This game ready asset provides you with all the grass foliage you need, as well a multi-layered Landscape Material.
Welcome to the release post of our new dynamic optimized grass asset for the Unreal Engine! In the following parts the important parts like animation or optimization methods will be displayed and explained.
A lot of information about the creation process are discriped in an interview I prepared together with **80.lv **If you are interested, just klick the link below:
** [80.lv Interview]](Preparing Realistic Grass in UE4)**
The goal of this asset is to offer an affordable grass asset with great visual quality and best possible wind animation with a good optimization for performant usage in games and even for cinematic scene rendering.
First of all, if you have any questions about this product feel free to contact me via mail ProjectNature@outlook.de and I will do my best to answer your questions!
Trailer video:
Showroom content:
Animation
For the animation creation we used the Pivot Painter tool 2.0. This results in a unique animation for each blade of grass. Cause this animation is generated in the shader it is as performant as using the “SimpleGrassWind” node. All wind parameters are easy adjustable and well explained in the dokumentation. You can choose from soft wind to hard wind, all possible wind directions and even dynamic bending of objects.
Optimization
Quad overdraw and shader complexety for foilage is a big thing. Most of the time a lot of performance is lost cause of this reasons. In this asset we tried to find the best balance between vertex count (object like geometry) and alpha overdraw (easiest geometry). The results can be seen in the picutre and vide below:
lit Scene -> Shader complexity -> Quad overdraw -> Shader complexity & Quad overdraw
[full resulution picture link]](Breakdown.jpg - Google Drive)
The “Grass Landscape Material Vol. I” Asset is free content for this product. You can check all the details about this project with the link below:
[Marketplace Link]](Grass Landscape Material Vol. I in Materials - UE Marketplace)
Hello.
Looks like a nice package. I’m trying to find a grass package to use for my game but have been disappointed with other marketplace offerings. I have some questions? How is the bending implemented on objects/characters? Is there/will there be an option for bent grass to remain bent either permanently or to slowly return to original position over time? Are you able to show the overdraw/shader complexity for a much larger and flatter field of grass with the point of view lower to the ground? I prefer detailed answers if you’ve got them!
Regards
John
Hello John,
first about the overdraw and shader complexity. In the link below I got you some pictures providing high resulution screenshots of 3 different scenes with all the different shader visualizations.
[Link]](Performance Overview GrassLibrary - Google Drive)
Now to the bending, I used a simple function which bends the texture away from the objects pivot point. The location of each colliding objects has to be setup in a material collection and the level blueprint. So the gras will bend away from your characters pivot point while you move around. At the moment there is no function what will bent permanetly or slowly return the grass from the bending effect, but this feature is allready planed. Unfortunately I can’t tell you an exact date at the moment.
Hopefully I answered your questions detailed enoth, but if you have any further questions, feel free to post them and I will do my best to answer them.
Best wishes,
Nils
Thank you Nils, I think I will hold off purchase for now until the planned features are implemented, but that is some impressively low shader complexity so this will stay in my shopping basket for sure!
Regards
John
Would this work out of the box (well) on high end mobile?
@**SlinkyMuffins: **Glad you like it, the most important goal was to optimize foilage as much as possible. I will post updates about this product here 
@EmpireLion: I answered your question as well in the Marketplace post. This depends on the settings and implementation in a mobile device. First of all, the animation will not work on mobile devices since the pivot painter tool shader is not implemented in mobile materials. (only the bending will work) Nevertheless with low shadow settings this asset could run on high end mobile, but I did not test it.
Best wishes,
Nils
First of all thanks a lot for all this positive response and support!
Update v1.1 notes:
- **discord **support for all my products
- additional 20-30% performance boost
- varios optimizations regarding shadow calculations
- fixed some misspelling
- redesigned the example landscape with 40k foilage instances (30k before) for better performance profiling
- integrated Distance Field Ambient Occlusion support
- guide for performance profiling is available in the documentation section
Join the **Discord **](ProjectNature Community)here!
Hi. Glad to see this is being updated, any word on the persistent bending feature?
Will be purchasing the bundle when ready.
Regards
John
Hello John,
all my assets will be updated regularly, depending on the community feedback.
The new interaction system will bend the texture (every single blade of grass different) in a combination of two directions.
One is in the running/walking direction of the character and the other one is a spherical based bending away from the characters capsule component.
All the bending will not stretch the grass texture.
You have the option to have a path behind you and costomize the lenth of the path up to about 6 meter.
Behind you the grass will bend back in the original position and swing arround for a costume time parameter.
All the bending is made in the shader and will not cause any performance issues.
The bundle will be available in the next days.
Best wishes,
Nils
**new **open world performance overview scene:
