| name | grass-instancing |
| description | Explains how GrassPlugin maps InstancedMesh pools to QuadTreeLOD chunks, including TSL wind animations and exclusion maps. |
Grass Instancing Architecture
The GrassPlugin.ts is responsible for rendering high-density foliage across the procedural terrain efficiently. It achieves this by coupling tightly with the QuadTreeLOD system.
Core Concepts
1. Chunk Integration
The GrassPlugin listens to chunk creation and destruction events from the TerrainSystem.
handleChunkCreated(chunk): When the QuadTree generates a new high-detail chunk close to the camera, the GrassPlugin claims a pre-allocated THREE.InstancedMesh from its object pool.- The
InstancedMesh is positioned perfectly over the chunk, and its instances (blades of grass) are mapped to the chunk's boundaries.
2. TSL Material & Wind Animation
The plugin uses WebGPU's Node Material System (TSL) to create highly performant shaders.
- Wind System: It passes uniform parameters (
_uWindSpeed, _uWindSwayStrength) to the TSL shader. The shader computes world-space sine waves to simulate wind gusts.
- Ground Blending: It samples the terrain's biome map texture to perfectly blend the root of each grass blade into the underlying terrain color.
3. Exclusion Mapping
To prevent grass from growing underwater or on steep cliffs, the plugin utilizes an exclusion texture.
- The GPU Compute pipeline generates a
spawnTex (which evaluates elevation, slope, and biome).
- The TSL vertex shader samples this
spawnTex to dynamically scale the grass blades to 0.0 in invalid areas (like deep water or solid rock).
Key Interactions
- Relies heavily on
TerrainSystem.js and GPUCompute.js for height/biome data.
- Controlled via parameters injected by
DebugUIPlugin.ts.
