After spending a lot of time profiling foliage for open world maps I came up with a good solution.
With this asset you can finally fill all your ground with grass/vegetation and use a high culling radius.
First a few pictures to show you what exactly I’m talking about:
A opacity mask is only used for the flowers. Because every blade of grass is made by one triangle, the quad overdraw is super low aswell.
For the textures I used scanned plants to make it look natural and this is the result:
@hippowombat: It simply does not use a opacity mask. But that would be a good idea aswell
@Luos: The interaction is like in all my assets, on the wind im working atm. With this implementation I can’t use my beloved pivot painter.
This is how the interaction will look like: (with a path behind the player)
@Luos: That should be possible, its actually quiet simple to achieve this effect by modifying the “simpleGrassWind” node and combining it with a change of the roughtness and specular chanals.
But I have to test this with this implementation first. I had this once on a big landscape, looking really good for a few minutes, then it drove me crazy
@Nerdsbeware: Glad you like it. For the LOD I used single poly blades aswell. Its basically reducing the density by each LOD level, that results in a good blend between the LOD levels and later the culling border.
Hi there, looks really nice regarding performance. Are you reworking the foliage assets from the marketplace for this result, or would it be possible to achieve these shader complexity results with your asset packs currently for sale on the store? (which I happen to have bought =] )
@WouterDB: Hello again! I added 27 new clusters to the grass pack a few weeks ago. There I optimized the quad overdraw. These can be used in large open worlds. Try these out!
Its hard to compare these two aproaches on grass, this here is only made for the best possible optimization. The grass asset I’m allready selling is looking way more natural and realistic with a pivot painted wind animation. In the picture below you can see the shader visualizations of the “interactive optimized Grass Library” with the latest update:
