a call for opinions - drawing grass
i'm working on drawing better grass plants in caveman.
here's where i'm at right now:
i cut it back from one plant every 2 feet to one every 3 feet. coverage is decent, but there are some gaps compared to one every two feet. one plant every two feet with a clip range of 1000 feet occasionally dropped below 60 fps.
the plants are about twice as tall as i'd like them to be. making them wide and short improves coverage, but then the plants look "squashed". so i can't make them any shorter without making them smaller, which doesn't cover the ground mesh as well.
right now i've been doing this with one plant per draw call, so i can rotate them around x and z to make them sway in the wind.
since draw calls is the big bottleneck, one option is to make a model with 4 or 9 plants in it. more plants with fewer draw calls. but then you can't tilt it in the wind without it looking funny as the plants in the "array of pants" move in and out of the ground.
so i was thinking about doing a combo of the two. make half of them single plants that sway, and the rest multiple plants that don't. or is what i have now good enough? the grass is technically too tall for photo-realism - even if i do manage to get a good model and texture and material and lighting going.
another question is: how far out do games typically draw highest LOD? playing mad max recently, it seems its pretty short in that game, maybe 10-20 meters? and other shooters too as i recall... i've been testing mostly with high LOD out to 1000 feet (304.8 m).
i did some tests with a single wide short qaud (10 foot wide, 2 foot tall) with 6 plant textures on it. looks great at long range. a distinct possibility for impostor use.
so should i stick with what i have?
or thicken it up with some static plants and make all the plants a more realistic scale, but not all animate-able?
or go for impostors at long range? one consideration there is i let the player zoom the 3rd person view camera waaaaay out (50 -75 feet?). so impostors couldn't kick in until 100-200 feet. should i cut the zoom out if needed?
i'd like to get as realistic as possible, in which case the grass in the screenshot may just be too big. i'm thinking it should only come up to between mid-calf and knee height.
and plants that aren't as wide look better. but don't cover as well, which means you need more plants.
is it crazy to try to draw high LOD grass out to 300 m ? should i set a more realistic goal like 10 m + impostors or fadeout?