Best way to do Vegetation?

[Mexicouger]

I am looking into vegetation(3D grass and plants), and have a couple various ways in my mind to go about it. I am curious to see how you guys would do vegetation for Darkplaces(Most optimal, best looking way).

My ways would be:

1- Create a particle graphic, add it to particlefont, alpha mask it, create a particle effect for it, and add a mapping entity where the particle can spawn in a randomized patch.
(Pros: fairly memory efficient, cons: not controllable, not affected by light)

2-Create 2 planes that intersect and use it as a model with an alpha grass vegetation texture. Spawn these models as an entity. (Pro: Full control of the grass in code, cons: uses alot more power to run them.)

On a side note, is there any way to make an alpha texture (whether it's tga or png) to be fully solid and not slightly translucent? Or is there a color in Darkplaces that can be used as a mask to remove a particular color?

[frag.machine]

[Hectate]

Combine the methods to get the best of both worlds?

Oh, and I didn't see anything on the DP docs that indicated that there could be a alpha map - it seems to be part of the diffuse only? I was going to suggest a 2-bit alpha texture if that was an option but I suppose not.

[goldenboy]

completely model it?

[leileilol]

BGRA32 should be fine.

Fun fact: on modern, shader-based hardware, it's slower to do the traditional alphatest than an alphablend.