Hi guys and girls im very new to unreal and previously only worked in gml .First of all this engine is amazing and im loving learning it .But i am having trouble creating foliage and grass for unreal 4.14 i am pretty good at blender as i have been using it for a number of years now so that is my preferred 3d asset creation programme . i also have a number of programmes namely crazybump substancepainter photoshop . i am quite frankly horrible at learning and i often take weeks to learn simple things . I have tried to follow tutorials on creating foliage but they usually use programmes i am not familiar with or asset packs that are no longer compatible with the new unreal 4.14 . i have all the gear and no idea as they say … i would prefer to learn how to create the grass etc myself rather than simply import an asset made by somebody else . even tho i did try that and failed i was left with the billboard planes with no grass visible … could anyone please refer me to a good tutorial for dumb people lol preferably using the programmes i have as i have looked and cannot find any that use my specific tool set … thanks guys
You have to make sure that you import the mesh + the texture so that you can create a material inside UE4 which you can assign to your grass mesh -> grass material: 
So bascially:
- create a grass patch texture
- create billboards in your 3d program + uv map it so that the texture gets displayed correctly
- import the mesh (fbx) and the texture
- create a material (right click on the texture)
- assign the material to the mesh
Thank you sounds simple enough ill let you know how i get on
really sorry for being so slow but im assuming i dont need to apply the texture inside blender only unwrap so that the uv cordinates get exported to unreal ?? or am i way off point… i have a tendency to overthink things which leads to confusion and general dumbness lol … when i create the billboards do i do so as one piece or multiple before i unwrap i mean ?
Yes and no ^^ -> you have to apply it in blender so that you can correctly uv map it or you could just export the uv map + then create the texture
lol ok sorry … unfortunately for you i do have another question lol so if i create 4 planes and have them crisscrossed do i make all planes into one object and then unwrap or do i unwrap each plane as a seperate object ??? sorry im having a hard time explaining quite what i mean
nope im gonna have to give up on this been sat here for 4 hours and cannot wrap my head around it i cannot get it to work the alpha channel is working in blender until i export to unreal and apply it to the mesh i then get a green mesh with the vague semblance of the grass outline and it looks horrible … i did do it my own way but it was far to resource heavy and my puny gtx 760 nearly died a million deaths … sorry thanks for your time bud
im hoping this edit does not bump this post but i finally stopped being an idiot and just kept going until i had it done and i have done it thanks in a huge part to … Thank you
I do now have a new issue which is when in lit mode my grass looks terrible and only looks good in unlit mode i have rebuilt the lighting and there was no notable improvement the grass is very dark and does not seem to receive light from my sky box and lamp etc
-make sure that you have created a good lightmap
-change the lightmap resolution
-do you use a “foliage shader”? -> like the one in the video above
-I personally would recommend you to use dynamic lights when you have a map with lots of vegetation -> you dont have to build the lightmaps + it looks better (in my opinion)
even tho i created my unreal account a while back i have only recently been learning it after building my new pc so lightmaps is something i guess i will have to look into as i have no idea what that even is … i thought rebuilding meant that it takes the light sources in your scene and calculates shadows etc … i have included a video showing my grass and you will notice my pc has some slowdown issues when i step into the middle of my small patch of grass and im guessing my pc is a little weak the specs are as follows
intel i5 6500
8gb ddr4
gtx 760 2gb
120 ssd 2x 500 gb hdd
this vid is just a world ive been learning in (trying to)