Hey.
So I’ve been thinking about making a shack with a roof made mainly of dry grass like this one here and I honestly don’t know how to approach it to make it look realistic. Making the texture and all that shouldn’t be much of a problem, but I don’t know how to make it actually look like it’s dry grass layered like in the picture. If i were to just make a flat texture it would look too… well, flat. Which I don’t want in this case. Performance is not an issue for this by the way, it’s just me trying to get this to look the way I want it to.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to approach something like that? It would REALLY help me out on this. I just don’t know if I should use a foliage system for this or something else.
Also, if this thread doesn’t belong in here, feel free to delete/move it. I didn’t know where else to put it because it’s such a general question.
Thanks in advance for any answers.
Cheers!
the thread is fine here, let me know if you want to edit the thread title.
If I was going to make that roof and performance wasn’t an issue I would make it by doing a flat plan with a normal map as a base and then to add layers I would do it with smaller planes stacked on top of each other that had a texture with an alpha channel the same as I would do hair on a human or furry animal.
hope that helps:)
So actually stacking planes on top of each other would work? I thought about that but I wasn’t sure about how the density of the texture should be. I didn’t know if it should contain very few blades of grass or lots of them. Still not sure about that. But I guess using planes for that would be the most logical way to do it, huh. I’ll try it out, then. Thanks for the answer!
Hi,
Well it is a quite complex material you trying to create, I think you will need to experiment with different approaches a lot, but how I’d get started is to create a base material of the grass, with normals etc. Then I’d create some alpha textures and lay them on top of the base material, creating the illusion of depth. As I heard this is a common practice in the industry for creating bushes etc.
Here is an example image, the inside of the bush is a sphere mesh with a “bush” texture applied, surrounded with alpha textures:
Thanks to you as well! I’m in the process of trying that at the moment, so I’ll see how it goes, I guess.
There’s many different ways for you to go around this. If the player should put a lot of focus into the roof, I would suggest you make the complex material that Kontur mentioned.
If the player on the other hand, shouldn’t put much focus on the roof (it’s just there to complete the building, and it’s a building you won’t even be able to enter, etc.), I would use planes just as suggested.
Either solution is great, but it depends on what exactly you want for your player 