I‘ve seen many videos today on the grass subject. Mainly it‘s the „same“ video, since each of them takes the route at one point to create a landscape and then it‘s happy painting afterwards.
I don‘t want to get involved with both of these steps. No landscape UE4 mesh, no painting.
Mainly I want to import my Houdini HDA with the attribute unreal_material linked to a grass material and then UE4 just applies the grass „where it belongs“ to. This should be done fully procedurally. A texture or vertex color could specify the density (painting stage in the tuts) of the grass.
I understand that the landscape is actually a heightmap, but I just need to apply grass to certain polygons. Not an entire world.
What I don’t understand is the concept what goes on behind the scenes. How does the landscape grass differ from regular instances? I could spawn points on my grass field inside Houdini and specify an instanced mesh inside UE4 to be instanced onto the points. Will this work for this purpose or is there something “wrong” with this approach.
Unfortunately all these videos just cover the landscape topic, but if you have small gardens on an architecture with several levels, probably even on top of each other the landscape approach looks a bit strange. And what about if the lawn is not a square, but roundish? The a landscape seems to be even more out of lace.
I suggest trying out the experimental procedural foliage.
unlike the grass node it works very similarly but gives you a bit more control.
If you really want to go at it by hand, you can try to use the grass field on a mesh material.
personally I never had any need for it.
The theory would be that if it works, you can feed it a mesh texture that defines where the grass should spawn much like you do for landscape. Wouldn’t hold my breath on it working though. But it is probable. And, it can also make some nice procedural rocks with randomized moss patterns if it does… I need to look into it myself now, see what you did?
