How can I permanently change grass foliage at run time to look as though it is trampled down when character passes over it?

Development Rendering
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1

Here is a link to someone who has achieved a variety of foliage manipulation, including the trampling effect which I’m wondering about.

I don’t need to have interactivity in that the grass moves in the wind or bends when I pass through it. I want to permanently “flatten” or “trample” it when my character moves through it.

Any suggestions for starting points? Is this a matter of changing materials at run time?

2

I guess there are a couple of ways to do it. Save texture that the foliage reads if it’s trampled or not (black/white) read from top down that they read run-time.

Make foliage Blueprints? store a value in each of the instances to make them trampled? (not sure what effect this would have on performance).

Generally the trampled effect in games today tend to just be in a radius around the character before the morph back to their normal state so in this case you would need to save the information somehow either way, permanent effects are always a head-ache and probably not worth doing in the end. (just some advice)