Was just curious is someone would be interested in make something long the lines (and selling it through the store), if it was possible, to make grass more realistic
To give an idea what I’m talking about, if you look at the Zelda U demo, they have fields of grass that flow with the wind and movement, it moves in a realistic way and each strand seems to be their own strand and not clumped together
Another would be Flower, that was done on the Vita, the field of grass just flowed nicely
I’m not sure how such a thing is done, but the grass looks nicer then when people use a big 2d planet and attach this grass texture to it
I’ve been playing around a lot with grass recently. If there was enough demand for a grass pack, I could provide something along those lines.
I believe the foliage changes in the most recent/next engine release, so I might need to relearn a few things. I would say that a per-blade grass setup would be extremely expensive. I would imagine that even Flower (which had amazing grass) made use of simple plane geometry with a lot of world/vertex displacement based on wind and interaction.
I could potentially release it on the store. What features would it need to be worth a purchase? I’m also playing around with realtime foliage growth and seasonal changes at the moment too.
I was looking at some games with the flowing grass fields (Zelda U and Flower as examples) and I liked the look of that better then what is traditional seen in a lot of games
I guess if I knew anything about this, but this is how I see…I guess using it (I’m no dev, I look for info for future use), but i would buy stuff for my team
easily able to change the grass texture
maybe mix different textures together into the grass patch (sometimes you have dying grass in places or whatever), or maybe layer texture or something
it easily attaching to the ground would be nice
I imagine using a brush placing down big grass patches
easy way to erase grass away (like some got on a road, and needs removed)
Unreal can do what you are describing. In the 4.7 release the shader for foliage got improved and we are getting some incredible grass related things in 4.8 and beyond.
There is even the nvidia Turf plugin in the works (so I heard) which is the same as that plugin for unity you mentioned. Only it looks soooo much better and is a wildly accurate simulation of grass behaviour.
Then there is speedtree which can easily make randomly generated patches of individual (or not) blades of grass. and it is affected by a wind actor:)
Then there are techniques for making grass “by hand”.
I mean… the foliage tool built into unreal engine can do all of the things you describe… even more than you described…the only thing you need is a grass mesh wih the material…
For that you need texturing and modelling knowledge or speedtree if you are lazy like me… How the grass mesh looks is up to you…
What you probably want is something that will give you all the assets already made, so you can just place them in the level… There are asset packs for that, but
there aren’t many… plus it will be better if you learn other software and let the creative juices flow by making it yourself.
Now when you say there aren’t many good examples of good grass in ue4… well there aren’t many in unity either… It’s mostly up to the skill of an artist to make good foliage, and up to techies to make it run smoothly.
As with all game developement aspects… it’s a game of balance… of what you could do with a pro artist to what is actually usable in gameplay…
I found this guy on the forums who released a great grass pack recently. It’s great for seeing how the meshes actualy look and how the materials are done.
Here are some more examples of grass inside unreal engine. Plus the amount will rise in the coming months due to the release of 4.7 and the upcoming release of 4.8.
this one is quite old so this guy could improve it even further
and then there is this… when we get this I’ll explode
