I’ve been lurking around these forums for a way, and you guys keep amazing me with your various creations.
As I’m new to both UE4 and the modeling software Blender, I’m still curious on best-practice and how-to’s, especially regarding nature assets / vegetation assets.
I was wondering how you guys manage to create trees, grass, bushes, stones, rocks, roads, etc., and was hoping that some of you would help out a fellow 3D modeler, with some tips and tricks to these assets.
If you’ve managed to create some nice trees or whatever, I’d like to see some pictures, just to see how you thought of it.
-Make sure that you always use planes for your vegetation assets -> dont add single leaves, it’s better for the performance when you use planes + a branch texture. It will give you a good result + it’s good for the performance.
-Grass and other type of foliage are also just some planes patched together -> e.g this package was made with that technique: https://www.unrealengine/marketplace/field-grass-package-vol ?v=VW3qYLZf0Q4
-You can also create trees and grass with tools like speedtree or tree[d]
-Always use a foliage shader in the UE4 to get the best result
-use realistic colours for your vegetation -> take a look at the nature and choose the right colour
The image in your Texture Sample, is that just a pure PNG with transparent background? Or does the green background (behind the leaves) have to be there? That’s one of the things I’ve never understood
Yes and no
As the alpha channel is not always perfect, it’s better to use a suitable colour (e.g in case of vegetation –> green) -> otherwise you will probably see a yellow frame around your material
You can either just add one single colour or there are also tools/plugins that are filling the background with suitable colours -> so that you get the perfect results (e.g in photoshop I use the solidify modifier from the flaming pear plugin)
Okay it seems like I managed to create the material. Now, how to I apply this to some sort of plane? I guess I need 3-4 planes, crossing each other (depending on the amount of grass I’d like), but how do I accomplish this? Do I need to create a static mesh using Blender, or can it be done within UE4?
Okay, so I figured it out. I’ve created some panes in UE4 with the grass material I’ve made. I then merged these planes using the “Merge Actors” feature within UE4, created a mesh out of it (Grass_01), and then created a foliage with this specific mesh.
Below is the end result (using a simple grass image from google)
Looks good, but it looks a litte bit high poly -> how many tris do you use for the mesh?
+sometimes it’s not so easy to just use planes, the correct way is to uv map the planes so that you can use a perfect texture (e.g on a 2k texture you can place different grass patches and then you can uv map it so that you can get a better variation)
Yep, triangles -> 1100 is a little bit high for 1 grass patch (I usually use around 13 tris for my grass) -> so in your case it would be good if you add some lod’s
LOD = level of detail
So that you have the high detailed mesh when you are standing right in front of it + a low detailed mesh when you are in the distance
