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