Sometimes it's really obvious combinations of basic techniques.
And sometimes a graphics programmer does a handful of vector products or matrix operations and produces something that makes you go 'how the hell did you think of that?' when you look at it. Any time I see a sufficiently amazing shadertoy the odds are decent that the actual code for it is way simpler than I expect but still nothing I could've come up with.
This is great. I’m working on a similar grass rendering inside Godot 4.0 - currently using MultiMeshInstance but was unhappy with performance / look even with the maximum of 65335 instances. I think I will try and apply some of the compute shader stuff for culling. Thanks for posting!
I wonder how that compares to SDF rendering of grass. SDF has a high cost due to the raymarching part, but you essentially get free repetition with local tweaks.