to do list (Admin only)
Add at least 2 excersises for people to follow along
Video 02 mentions normal map filter in photoshop, but doesn't exist anymore. Share an image of a substance designer setup instead.
We need to add exercises to this lesson.
Replace the final image with assets provided by Dennis
LESSON OVERVIEW
In this lesson we will be taking the learnings from Creating a foliage atlas to the test in order to create grass. This lesson will be showing you how to prepare your foliage atlas for grass, cutting out grass pieces and then taking it all into SpeedTree to make grass.
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Missing LESSON OVERVIEW
Foliage atlas creation
As we do not have proper scans of grass fronds, we need to find a workaround.
However we don't really have the resources for anything expensive, this being especially true if you are just starting as a beginners with lower available resources. The following method is a good workaround that finds a good balance between quality and not having to buy an expensive setup or pictures taken in a professional way.
With a simple setup of taking a black matte piece of paper, your phone and some nice weather we can just go outside and take some top down pictures from a couple of individual pieces of grass that we can then combine to make our patches of grass later.
The following workaround may require some clean up, which we will take a look at in the following video.
Here's an example of another foliage atlas that is based on the same technique.
However, I've also created a full breakdown video on my personal channel to teach you how to use photometric stereo photogrammetry in a more complex setup.
This video can be found in the lesson RESOURCES
Speedtree setup
Now that we have our foliage atlas, we can jump straight into SpeedTree to start working on the actual meshes, staring with the individual meshes and later combining them into grass tufts we can use.
Cutting our grass strands
First step here is to import our foliage Atlas textures and set them as our material. Then then allows us to open the "Cutout Editor" which can be used to make cutout meshes, these are flat pieces of geometry based on a texture.
VIDEO EDITING POLISH
- There are still Uhmn's present in the video
Creating our grass
We just created our leaf cards and are now able to work on the grass asset itself. There are multiple ways of doing this and for the purpose of keeping things simple for now, we are going to create a simple bushy grass tuft.
Take into account that actual grass grows more like bamboo and needs a more complex setup but for now we want to keep it simple to get used to the SpeedTree.
Always analyze your references thoroughly and try the best to replicate the structure of the plant you are working on.
This completed this short lesson on creation your own grass meshes, all these techniques can also be used to create stylised grass at the same time, so make sure to experiment with the foliage atlas you bring to the table.
Lod creation
As we mentioned before optimisation is really important when scattering grass, so let's dive into the LOD creation process. A difference 0f 10 triangles can mean a difference between 10000 triangles or more on a scene basis, just for one asset in your scene. Which could be huge!
So let's dive into creating LOD's for your foliage assets before finishing off our grass asset.
POLISH NOTE:
Image needs to be replaces with final render using Dennis's Assets
This completed this short lesson on creation your own grass meshes, all these techniques can also be used to create stylised grass at the same time, so make sure to experiment with the foliage atlas you bring to the table.
So make sure to keep optimisation on mind!
RESOURCES
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MISSING RESOURCES