3 replies to this topic

[bortimus]

I'm wondering if this is worth pursuing further...  

 

This hideous abomination is a trunkless tree using low quality grasses as the leaves.  The leaves are cross shaped to give a bushier look and rotated upwards to sit on the ground like a patch of grass.  The alpha cutoff had to be increased quite a bit.

Yes it is quite ugly, but the idea is to use a mixture of different patches like this to cover large swaths of land in the distance, and then plant better looking individual grasses closer to where players will likely land.  

Players wouldn't...well, shouldn't be seeing this up close.

Since these 5 grasses are "one tree", will there be any FPS benefit to doing this rather than traditionally planting grass?  Total waste of time?

[NoPutt]

What is the tri count of the tree/grass? I think most of

us use 2 plane trees and bushes for areas away from

play, and you can plant those almost to your hearts

content without much increase in fps. They have a very low poly

count but do not sway in the wind, whereas a decent looking speedtree

has a count of between 4000 and 5000 and some even larger and 

can add up polys quickly. Billboarded grasses seem to work best if

not planted too thickly and they do sway but always face the camera.

Hard to tell exactly how your tree/grass looks in the pictured setting, but

looks fine to me. I'm sure someone will come along to add more detail

to my novice explanation.

[bortimus]

Right now the grass grouping is 64 verts/ 32 tris.  

I'm more or less just toying around with creating meshes that combine several plants into one bushy grouping.  There's probably no real benefit to it but it's fun to experiment. 

If nothing else at least I'm learning a little about the tree creator hehe

[NoPutt]

A good texture base that matches the grass being grown

will go a long way. Trying to fill a bad texture with

good grass never works and looks hedious.Plant thick then go back and thin

with a lower opacity brush and open brush selection.

Most of all, Have Fun.