Hello everyone,
I’ve recently just started learning UE4 and my current aim is to learn some basic foliage creation. I watched a few tutorials covering the subject and I think I get the workflow and the technique pretty well. However, I am still not satisfied with the results, even after trying different approaches and following different tutors - my grass just can’t get close to the tutorials concerning quality. The worst part is that I can’t figure out where the problem really is - I’m trying to combine the tricks from videos, and the effect is… well, mediocre at best. Could you please give me a hint how to polish up the overall quality of the foliage? I’m worried mostly about the edges of the grass blades, shading of the whole mesh and the texture quality (I use 2048x2048 textures, 8-bit: color - combined in Photoshop from base texture and ao overlay, both baked in xNormal - and normals)… Any help would be appreciated, since I’m running out of ideas on improving the thing.
Today I tried LODs (full geometry of a few blades as LOD0 and alpha card as LOD1), and the details on close-ups looked really promising, but my computer didn’t manage to go through the lighting build step (does it have something to do with the fact that I’m running UE4 on lenovo laptop with integrated graphic card? I hope it doesn’t…).
Here are 4 files to illustrate what I’m talking about:
1 - grass as seen in level editor veiwport in game mode (notice the fps drop);
2 - close-up from the editor viewport, notice shading artifacts, texture quality and grass blade edges;
3 - material in UE4;
4 - mesh, as seen in Blender.
Thanks in advance for any feedback and suggestions 