Ultra Stylized Grass

Beginner Documentation

Part 1 - Intro & The Basics

Part 1 - Intro

First and foremost, thank you for buying/viewing Ultra Stylized Grass! I put a lot of work into getting this grass to be as versatile and performant as possible. With that being said, it can be a bit confusing to beginners, so this intro should help you with that.

I’ll be showing you the basics of where to find files, why I included them, and how to change the parameters. I’ll also show you how to add it to your landscape in a new level. I will also add an RVT tutorial soon.

Part 1 - Intro

To begin, I want to talk about the structure of the asset and what you’ll find. In the UltraStylizedGrass folder, you’ll find Maps, Materials, Meshes, and Textures. The maps folder has levels that are basic demonstrations of the asset in use, the textures, meshes, and materials folders are all self explanatory. In the Materials folder, you’ll see it gets a bit more confusing. There are 4 separate folders, and these all have materials in them that do different things.

Part 1 - Intro

-The Opacity_Advanced material is the material that will require the best hardware to use. I recommend only using it if you’re making a game for PC and consoles. This is because it uses Opacity, which requires a texture and is a lot harder to render considering it’s a translucent masked material. If you need to use a texture, and there’s no way around that, then the opacity materials are the ones you should use. If you want super dense, lush grass with variation, use the Opaque_Advanced material. This is a material that requires the grass to be physically modeled, rather than using a texture. This is a lot better in most scenarios, as you’re not calculating any opacity and you’re only limited by the amount of triangles you’re capable of drawing on screen at once. I will always recommend the opaque materials over opacity (in some cases, opacity can be better for mobile).

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-The Advanced materials have more features such as color variation and directional wind, but they are more expensive (not by much). The simple materials are, well, simple. Usually, you can use the advanced materials with no issues. TL;DR: Use Opaque Advanced most of the time if you can.

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Material Parameters

If you open UltraStylizedGrass -> Materials -> Opaque_Advanced, MI_Stylized_Grass_No_ShadowsWithVariation, you’ll see the following parameters. BaseColor, ColorVariation, SecondaryColorVariation, and TipColor are all controlling the colors. TipColorStrength simply controls how much effect the TipColor should have. The VariationMaskSize and VariationSpeed is used to control the global mask that is required for the color variation to work. If you tick the UseVariation box, you’ll notice the variation color goes away. If you want to use an RVT, you’d only have to change these colors on the landscape. The only downside to this is that you can’t pan these colors through with the RVT (there’s a workaround to this though). It’s worth noting that some of the clamps for color are NOT clamped, which means some colors may be too bright and look ugly. You can choose to ignore this and play with the colors as is, or change that to get more even results. The wind settings are standard UE SimpleGrassWind, however the WindScale, WindSize1, and WindSize2 control the size of the mask that pans over the grass. I encourage you to mess around with those settings, you get really awesome results with different scale settings.

Adding Clamps

If you want to essentially help control the color a bit more, you can add a clamp node to the lerps. The only thing this really affects is the color in this case, because most of the other ones are clamped. This is an error on my part that should hopefully get updated soon. Note: You don’t have to do this whatsoever, it just might help you understand the colors you’re adding to the grass a bit more.

Part 2 - Adding the grass to a new landscape

Part 2 - Adding a new landscape

To make a new landscape and spawn the grass, simply create a new landscape in the “Landscape” tab, and then apply the MI_Landscape_WithVariation material.

Fixing the Black Landscape

After you’ve created a landscape, you’ll realize the entire thing is black. Not to worry! This is completely normal. Simply open the “paint” tab of the landscape and click the “None” to add the Layer Info needed to make it spawn. Boom, you should have working grass in your scene.

Changing the grass that is spawned on the landscape

The way the grass is spawned on is by utilizing the Landscape Grass Type. This is extremely common, and if you’re confused about it I recommend watching a tutorial on it. (There are hundreds). Inside LGT_Grass02, you can change the density, scale, and grass mesh used. The sm_grass_06 mesh is being used in the screenshot. The grass will only spawn on the first layer. “Layer01”.