I have taken advantage of an auto-material that does grass with foliage which looks great.
I would like to remove the foliage underneath a PCG spline pathway, and/or inside a enclosed PCG Spline biome.
1 - If this is possible, how would I reference the spline inside the auto-material?
2 - If not, is there another way to place global foliage efficiently (PCG appears to be very expensive on CPU and FPS)
Unfortunately, I have run out of search-foo on this topic - most resources I find only touch the very basic of each concept (auto-materials with foliage vs the new procedural content method) and nothing seems to cover combining the ideas.
Current result:
Apply brushify to the world, grass texture and grass static_mesh appear everywhere.
Apply PCG spline to an area that places new static mesh on Landscape to simulate the appearance of a path.
Grass grows “through” the static mesh.
Desired result:
Apply brushify to the world, grass texture and grass static_mesh appear everywhere.
Apply PCG spline to an area that removes the existing texture and static_meshes applies a path texture with pebbles static_mesh instead.
Apply PCG close spline to create a new biome, removing all pre-existing foliage and applying new texture.
I’m trying to find a way to procedurally spawn grass on top of an imported site model and only add grass to specific parts of the imported model that have the 2D grass material applied. If you can think of any possible solutions let me know! This would be for ArchViz so I’ll have to reimport the model several times and don’t want to have to manually paint grass. Wish UE5 had a tool for 3D grass materials like Lumion has.
I’m also working in Arch-Viz and have been pursuing a solution to 3D Grass like you mentioned. Did you have any luck finding a way to replicate Lumion’s 3D Grass? I feel PCGs could be a good route, but the tool seems to be changing so frequently, it’s hard to establish a solid workflow/custom tool for that.
Not yet. I see Epic added a procedural grass tool in Twin Motion, so I’m hoping they make it easier to do in UE. They probably have a good bit of improvement to do for the grass in Twin Motion, though.
I haven’t had time to experiment yet, but I’m getting back into it. AI suggests the following general approach for procedural grass on architectural (static mesh actor) site models, which have multiple materials applied to the surface:
PCG Surface Sampling
Use the PCG Surface Sampler to generate sample points across the mesh surface.
Filter by Texture
Use a PCG Attribute Filter or logic to select only points where the grass texture is applied.
Edge Erosion / Safety Margin
Apply shrink/erosion in PCG to keep grass away from sidewalks, curbs, or other hardscape surfaces.
Spawn Grass Meshes
Connect filtered points to a Mesh Spawner node.
It’s archviz, it hardly matters what you do if all you need a still.
Placing the grass with the manual foliage brush tools is probably much better since none of the automated tools will allow you to place enough meshes in a zone to make it look realistic.
Do whatver, but compared to the 20 seconds you need to add a grass mesh to foliage and paint it manually, you are just going to waste time…