[CREATION]Dynamic Grass - Grass that goes away the more you walk on it

[MrGoatsy]

I made this today:

Unreal Engine 4 Dynamic Grass

It is grass that slowly goes away the more you walk on it.

[presto423]

Nice job, but not too realistic lol. Could be useful for something, perhaps an alien terrain.

[MrGoatsy]

The grass mesh used is only an example, you can use whatever mesh you want.

[presto423]

It’s cool. I was being a bit facetious, not really criticizing.

[MostHost_LA]

If you want some pointers…
make it so it can grow randomly in height with a per instance random variation.
if you encode the vector paint of the mesh with the normalize 0-1 range of each vertex you can grow natural looking strands.

Whatever method you are using to displace it, the winner is by far vector fields. Scencaptude 2d of controlled niagara sprite emitter on properly colored backdrop allows for excellent details and an RT that can move the grass rather then shorten it. So you can push strands left or right - mind you that this is dependent on the mesh setup and doesn’t look super good because the pivot point of the grass mesh isn’t at the bottom of each strand - if you work hard you can make a pivot point texture to feed all the pivot points in. I think its overkill. But on bigger grass like what you have it could be better.
Look into how pivot painting works, possibly one could encode local pivots on Vector paint too, But as usual you already use vector paint to grow the mesh and add wind, so you don’t really have 3 channels… or it limits the masks you can use for vector stuff. No big deal really, use alpha for the height and thats that.

Maybe after the jam I’ll try and cook in the mesh paint to generate pivot info for each of them… I betcha that rotate about axis wouldn’t distort it anymore if I do… lol now I’m glad I read this topic as I have been stuck on how to make it look right for a while ;0

[MrGoatsy]

@MostHost_LA

If you want some pointers…
make it so it can grow randomly in height with a per instance random variation.
if you encode the vector paint of the mesh with the normalize 0-1 range of each vertex you can grow natural looking strands.

Whatever method you are using to displace it, the winner is by far vector fields. Scencaptude 2d of controlled niagara sprite emitter on properly colored backdrop allows for excellent details and an RT that can move the grass rather then shorten it. So you can push strands left or right - mind you that this is dependent on the mesh setup and doesn’t look super good because the pivot point of the grass mesh isn’t at the bottom of each strand - if you work hard you can make a pivot point texture to feed all the pivot points in. I think its overkill. But on bigger grass like what you have it could be better.
Look into how pivot painting works, possibly one could encode local pivots on Vector paint too, But as usual you already use vector paint to grow the mesh and add wind, so you don’t really have 3 channels… or it limits the masks you can use for vector stuff. No big deal really, use alpha for the height and thats that.

Maybe after the jam I’ll try and cook in the mesh paint to generate pivot info for each of them… I betcha that rotate about axis wouldn’t distort it anymore if I do… lol now I’m glad I read this topic as I have been stuck on how to make it look right for a while ;0

The grass mesh is just an example, you can replace it with w/e mesh you want and it should still work fine.

[MostHost_LA]

@MrGoatsy

The grass mesh is just an example, you can replace it with w/e mesh you want and it should still work fine.

the mesh you used has little to do with my pointers… I’m sure it reads like an intelligible consciousness stream, but it makes perfect sense to me- to the point I’ll have to refer to it when I pack the vertex points ;p