Grass Atlas

A Grass Atlas is one texture containing multiple individual grass or plant images arranged in a rectangular grid. Grassworks uses atlasColumns and atlasRows to interpret that texture.

How the grid works

The atlas itself is the texture source, configured with grassAtlas. The grid dimensions describe how that source texture is divided; they are not separate top-level Grassworks.create() properties.

grassParams: {
  useTextureColor: true,
  atlasColumns: 4,
  atlasRows: 4
}

Variation is an authoring problem, not only a performance problem

Grassworks can select different atlas cells across Billboard elements, allowing a field to avoid the visual repetition of one repeated plant image. A larger, well-authored atlas gives you more source variations and therefore more room to build a natural-looking field.

Mix grass with flowers and other plants

The atlas does not have to contain only grass. For example, a 4×4 atlas can contain ten grass images and six flower images. The same Billboard system can then produce varied ground cover rather than a field that visually reads as a single repeated grass texture.

This is where Billboard can become a genuinely artistic system: the atlas becomes the palette from which the field is composed. The quality of the source images, their silhouettes, color variation and cell arrangement have a direct effect on the final result.

Related parameters

See atlasColumns, atlasRows, useTextureColor and grassAtlas.