Alireza Khajehali: Choosing Grass Shape

Another portion of tips and tricks from Alireza Khajehali. All you need to know about the best shapes of grass. 

I have experimented with lots of grass meshes and lots of grass fields. One of the nicest ones for me (in terms of forms) is the one below. My goal was to create a low poly grass field that runs well and has some interesting height variations to it. So I made a lot of grass meshes and I’m gonna show the two winner meshes below.

Above is the medium grass. It’s a single plane instanced 6 times. The texture that I’m using on the mesh is actually very straight grass blades material from Megascans and I couldn’t really find my desired texture on the  library so in order to make it look more like bent grass patches I’ve rotated the two instances on each end outwards. Doing this I realized the curve that’s created on the top (as you’re seeing in the front view) adds a ton to the look of the grass field when I’m looking at it in UE4. That curve makes it transit smoothly to the other small grass. The 3 other instanced planes are doing a great job making it look more 3D from perspectives other than front. Basically X grass as you see in the top view.

This is the mesh for the small grass:

I have been doing a lot of variations but in the end I went with this setup to have a more uniform distribution since this is actually small grass and is only there so when you look down you see some stuff going on around you, not dense at all. If you’re wondering why the square shape, I’ll cover that some time later. So the two grass meshes aside, I’m mostly relying on the grass material that’s on the landscape surface. Here’s me looking down:

When looking at a large grass field all grass meshes get culled at some distance. I did endure a lot of pain in order to make the transition from grass meshes to landscape grass material less apparent when the meshes are culled. I’ll cover this at a later day as well.

The guide was originally published on Polycount.