What is it about?
Adaptive coverage
of a height_field
Block coverage, export to POV-Ray
Download
<----------------------- If
you're in a hurry, it's there!
Documentation
Screenshot
History
Creating grass covered areas in POV-Ray meets one major problem: memory footprint. It is quite usual to use millions of grass blades to cover a not-so-wide area. Till now, two solutions have been available, that minimize the problem:
The principle used in this software is to extend the principle of Gille Tran's macros, to cover any height field. The original method cannot be directly used, since a bumped area cannot be precisely covered with big, flat patches. The height_field is divided into a set of small square blocks, which can be approximated by a reduced subset of bumped blocks, simply by applying symmetries, rotations and vertical translations. This method falls in the category of the "dictionary" data compression algorithms, the most famous element of which is the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm, once pattented by Unisys, but which is now public domain, putting an end to the kind of complete messes software pattents can lead to ;-)
This software takes as input a greyscale image, in PNG (highly recommended), GIF (if needed) or JPEG (to be avoided) formats, in 8-bit depth. It also accepts 16-bit images encoded using red and green.
Image dimension is practically limited to a bit less than 1024x1024. It is possible
to use bigger images, but it can be necessary to increase the memory
available to the Java virtual machine, for instance using
java -Xmx256m -jar hfc.jar
, which extends the default
64 MB to 256. However, do not forget that the aim is to place grass leaves, not to draw an accurate HF.
If HFC seems not to do anything when loading an image, you should
probably guess that the image is too big. First try using a smaller
scale version, and only increase the available memory if you
really need it.
Two parameters are necessary to build the dictionnary: block size, and the threshold under which two blocks will be considered similar. Generally speaking:
Practically, 8x8 pixels often lead to good looking results,
combined with a threshold around one quarter the height of the
blades.
The result of this first step is internal, and features a
dictionnary of the blocks needed to rebuild the HF, and a
conversion table giving, for each block of the HF, the corresponding
block in the dictionary, and the transformations to be performed to
convert between each other.
The software reports the nomber of blocks of the main "grid", the dictionary size, and the amount of blocks used only once in the building process: if this number is too high, it can be useful to increase the threshold.
The second phase consists in covering each block of the dictionary,
and copying this block wherever it is needed.
Several algorithms are available, and new ones can easilly be added
using Java programming. One system allows basic export using a pair
of crossed triangles for each blade. A second system uses the same ideas
as Gille Tran's makeblade macro.
Both generate POV-Ray files using the mesh2 syntax, thus reducing the
parsing time to a minimum: a cliff covered with 3 million basic blades
will be parsed in 7 seconds.
An estimation of the output file size is provided before exporting
For portability and development speed reasons, this software is
written in Java. Computing time is usually reasonnable, a few minutes
being a maximum. You will need a
full Java VM (version 1.4), and
Java3D
extension (any version). If you still use windows, it is strongly
recommended to upgrade to a working JVM, such as Sun's one.
This is free software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or higher at your option.
It's here: hfc.jar. Download the archive
(~75 k), do not uncompress it,
and double-click on its icon or type java -jar hfc.jar
to run
the software.
The source files are also available for those interested: hfc_src.zip
Don't worry: the screenshot is in French, but the default GUI is in English. A Japanese version should follow soon.
© François Dispot 2003-2007