Although not specifically about OpenGL, I think this shows some really good results of normal mapping billboards. Check out the movies.

http://www.drone.org/tutorials/lighting_...jects.html

-Jon

Jesus H. Christ that's a nice quad.

This is an interesting paper on real time grass:

http://w3imagis.imag.fr/Publications/2001/PC01/

Some ideas in there

-Jon

Cool, thanks for the links!

Right now (Before I read the post) I made a class that generates X amount of random points and then assigns variables depending on what surface they lay on (no grass growing in the water). I quickly then rendered them with GL_Lines and it looked bad because they were all the same width regardless of distance. I can still use the same code for billboards. I will post a screenshot when I get it finished.