Thank you! The fuzzy grass I posted before is using a bit of a hacky method to look nice since it uses translucency to get the soft look. Not only is translucency more expensive to render, but it causes sorting issues, so I’d avoid it overall. My new grass tests are using the standard masked shader and while it doesn’t have the soft look, it certainly performs better and is more lifelike in terms of shading.
-
Geometry for the grass: the old translucent grass was just a bunch of scattered planes with multiple blades on them, but now I use a single blade per card approach with LODs.
-
The translucent grass geometry isn’t casting shadows, purely relying on SSAO for depth. (again the new grass I’ve been working on does cast shadows and it gives a more accurate looking result, especially when combined with contact shadows).
-
Yep, I often inject landscape color into the grass by simply having the same world space tint in the landscape and grass shader- this allows the blend between grass and the landscape to match up a bit better, especially at distance (reduces obvious pop in).
-
Yes, definitely used SSS (the old translucent grass just used the albedo maps for that, but with my new grass, Megascans comes with translucency maps which work really great).
-
The old translucent grass only had one mesh variation (it was a super early and primitive test). The new ones have 3 variations per species.
Generally 4K for foliage/surfaces but it can easily scale down to 2K and 1K and not lose much impact!
Thank you! Running a 4K monitor with a GTX 1080!
Haven’t gone anywhere 
Have just been busy working on a foliage pipeline vs creating new scenes! Back to scene work soon! Always keeping up to date with the engine and the awesome stuff on the forums.