So I am currently working on some grass, as you do. Now I have gotten myself some great results, however, I have a problem with the lightning.
As you know in the real world lightning would penetrate a grass straw. This is what I’m trying to achieve with my grass. For you to better understand I have uploaded two pictures of my grass. One where the camera’s back faces the sun and one where the camera looks towards the sun. As you can see on the Picture#2, It looks horrible.
Now I’ve tried to follow some guides that recommends doing a TwoSidedSign inside the Grass Material, taking the Normal Map and Multiplying it with the TwoSidedSign and popping that into the Normal.
This makes the Picture#2 look better I guese, but it destroys Picture#1. Here’s a screenshot of what the grass look like now, no matter the camera angle.
Some of you may think this is okay, I however think it looks very bad and very noise far in the back.
Now my question to you guys.
Do you have any other way of faking the lightning penetration? A workaround or something useful?
Here you can see the camera looking at the sun and from the sun. I just use directional light (sun) and a skylight. Both movable with dynamic lighting.
Here is a screenshot of my Grass Mat. I apologies if it looks a bit messy.
I’m gonna have to post multiple screenshots.
Some of the Normalmaps are missing, however, It doesn’t matter as I was just trying different ones.
I have the TwoSidedSign connected to the material here, which gives me the Picture#3 result on my first post.
EDIT:
I too use Directional Light and Skylight. Movable and all. The mesh is also moveable since static will give me horrible results when I build the Lightning.
Here is my material. It’s quite simple if you ignore the color variance on the base color.
You should try to use the two sided foliage shading model, and tweak the subsurface color. Can’t remember why, but I also unchecked Tangent Space Normal.
In material you should set the Shading Model to “Two Sided Foliage”.
Also disconnet anything from AO slot.
And don’t use the TwoSidedSign node with the normal map. (I know it’s supposed to give better results, but it doesn’t).
So I tried the Two Sided Foliage Shading which didn’t do anything. Subsurface didnt either, but atleast this is useful. The thing that worked was when I unchecked Tangent Space Normal.
I now have all these settings just to make sure. The results are, well, stunning… But perhaps to stunning? This is by far a better result, but as I will show you, it is a bit extreme.
EDIT: After looking at the grass I suddenly realized the grass isn’t casting any shadows even tho Cast Shadow is checked. I’m going to Build Lightning to see if that will fixed the issue.
I already disconnected the TwoSidedSign and I tried to disconnect the AO, it however didn’t make any difference in that matter. Setting the Shading Model to Two Sided Foliage also didn’t do the trick. I did what hallatore told me to do and uncheck Tangent Space Normal, which did the trick.
By unchecking tangent normals it makes all mes normals pointing upwards therefor you get wrong lighting on your grass, like reflections you see here in the middle:
I have now done that. I got a very Fantasy looking Grass, not much color vari. So I did an Blend.Overlay with my diffuse, which gave me the result I was looking for.
I however can’t help to miss the reflection. Is there really no way of decreasing the intensity of the reflection on the grass?
Also, Like I said before, my grass doesn’t cast a shadow, even tho I have checked it on. Here’s a screenshot.
Now Here is a screenshot of the mesh in the render window.
I can’t really make sense of what I might have done to mess it up.
EDIT: I fiqured it out! I had to change some settings within the Directional Light. I now have some awesome realistic reflections and shadows now!
Here is a look of my result.
