Plants,foliage and leaves creation techniques

Development World Creation
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1

I’m running a small development team over in Greece, we’re doing our best to make an RPG as it will be the first actual game for all of us.
We did a bootcamp to get things going teamwise, learn to work as a group, get some experience as we’re all university students.
We’ve now started taking our firs steps in creating our RPG, but I’ve run into a problem with our initial plant Models, apart from some standard UV errors we know how to fix, our vegetation and tree leaves have a weird look to them.
https://i.gyazo/4bab685b928796efda91803abf35e22b.gif
https://i.gyazo/3809a88c5f9055eb8faf5dcec3ca9cad.gif
It feels very antiquated honestly. And I thought Making the leaves and foliage rotate relative to the camera’s position would be the best soluction to this.
After browsing a bit of other grass meshes created by other UE users here on the forums I firstly developed a minor inferiority complex and secondly realised our method seems actually archaic.
The models we’re making are basically so we can learn and adjust to what we need. Is there a way inside UE to fix these models into something better?
And if there even is. What kind of deal do I have to make in the name of the seven hells to actually make grass and foliage like this?:
https://www.dropbox/s/fvu7e1mb7rkuttv/grass_lighting.jpg

Any tips or help is very much appreciated, be kind we’re still learning.

Thank you very much for your time.

2

-make sure that you enable “two sided” in your materials
-use a foliage shader material
-in most of the cases you use billboards for your 2nd or 3rd LOD level -> so mostly you use more tris for your LOD0

Grass is pretty easy to create -> you just need a good texture, a mesh with normals that are facing the right way, a foliage material and a good light setup :slight_smile:
In the thread from the pic that you have posted, you can find some information about how he made this kind of grass

3

Blender ?v=X-Z1glEEk0s

4

That’s not suitable for games :wink:
The grass that you can see on the upper picture was rendered in the UE4 -> so it was made with static meshes
Here is a basic tutorial about that: ?v=Pqb76OXSQSY

7

The “facing to camera” should be done for distant LOD’s as the player wont realize it :slight_smile:
But when you do it in a very clever way, you can also use it for your LOD0 to decrease the tri count -> speedtrees are using this technique

8

Nice tut. Thanks

9

Here are two foliage tutorials, both are a few years dated but the basic workflow is still the same.

1)://joopson3d.tumblr/post/30984980518/foliage-workflow-for-udk
2)://www.cryengine/community/viewtopic.php?f=315&t=100319