To go along with my ideas, since i was tasked with the foliage, i had to create some grass for our scene. I was a little confused at first on how to do this so i went to Discord and messaged my tutor Henry for some advice, and as always he was quick to respond with some very helpful information and some examples, as well as a tutorial he recorded himself specific to my question.
I opened Maya and after looking at the Maya files he sent me, studying the way the planes were shaped and positioned, I created a plane with 10 height subdivisions and started to make my own attempt at grass.
I’m not going to lie, this really frustrated me because I’ve always found grass a challenging task whether it be in just drawing it or modelling it like now, just don’t understand how to make it look natural yet still appealing. had to look up a lot of different reference images of real blades of grass and 3d models just to get an idea of the shapes i wanted to go for, while also flicking back and forth from Henry’s examples.
Using vertex selection mode, i started to scale them down in the x axis to make the grass thin, tapering the top, then up in the y axis to give them length and duplicated my main blade of grass so i could create different variants. Using the soft selection tool quite a lot of the time, i was rotating the planes in directions i thought would look interesting, coming out of it a few times to precisely select vertexes and move them one by one, rotating them so they didn’t go out of shape. I placed each blade of grass slightly apart from one another, trying to get appealing overlap but my first attempt didn’t look very good to me so i started again.
My next attempt i did basically everything the same, but i tried to think of it more as a 3d object than 2d planes, and this resulted in something i was much happier with. I took the blades of grass ,using D to move the pivot point to the bottom of the blade, and rotated them but instead of rotating them left and right, i rotated them outwards, curving like a real blade of grass, then positioned them in a more circular formation to give them a sense of volume and fullness rather than 4 blades in a straight line. Since some of the normals were reversed which could be seen by a black surface, i used the reverse tool to flip the normals back to face the outside where my texture would later be displayed.
Once happy with my model, i UV unwrapped it using the create planar tool on the z axis of each grass blade then unfolded it and used the layout tool. There was no need for creating cuts as this as a 2D plane and not 3D object with multiple sides. Before exporting, I selected the clumps of grass blades and combined them, creating three different clumps of grass so it would hopefully help make the landscape more interesting.
I took each grass clump object into substance painter and textured it by using a fill layer to begin with for my base colour then using paint layers above that to go over it with different shades of green, yellow and a cyan colour to make a stripe down the middle of each individual blade for detail.
I exported the textures from substance and applied them to my models in Maya, the exported the FBX files from Maya and imported them in Unreal, using the foliage mode to plug the grass objects into so i could turn up the density then start painting on the landscape to see how the grass would look, and it didn’t look too bad. Below are the many different attempts i had at making the grass and painting it onto the land, the first three screenshots just have a placeholder lambert texture for the grass, while the rest are the textured materials.
Updating after ive finished all assets: I created a small scene with the grass and I’m quite proud of how i seems to be turning out.
refs:
Looking at these pictures helped me understand how i could model my grass and position it to make it have more volume and look more realistic. I also looked for 3d models of other creators to see how they approached making grass.