Here is my idea remember those hologram rulers we used to get at school if you look at it from one angle you got one picture and it changed when you tilted it. well if i took a load of pictures of a patch of grass at different angles giving me say 30 textures then code them to morf on a single plane surface so depending on the angle the camera is at or how high it is gives the effect of the grass standing up better than just using top down and normals as the way to fake the 3D. the reason i say this is GTA if your flying along and then BAM a tree suddenly spawns and your dead. i dont like the look of my grass growing as i run along. the grass textures look great but there is no sence of depth especially low down then all that would be needed would be high LOD grass to Not spawn localy but move on one fixed plane in front of the camera when going prone AS you go down to a low level at shallow angles but merge in cleanly. … the stuff that can be done with water is amazing using one flat surface my screen on my laptop is flat so needing to model every blade seems mad 30,000,000,000+ vert’s vs 8 vert’s + 30 textures. JUST AN IDEA AT THE MOMENT I COULD SORT THE 720 deg TEXTURES OUT if someone would help implement the idea into a material
UE4 actually already has that kind of feature: Render 3D Imposter Sprites | Unreal Engine Documentation
However, for grass it would have too high of a performance impact. Grass mostly looks fine as it is anyway though.