Then I started painting, getting results like this: I added an LOD group (trees only get billboarded if they are made with tree creator, this is the SpeedTree approach which just uses Unity's LOD group to cull at a distance). I ended up with it looking like this, using that same texture from before: I also added a ton of features during this process to improve the color of the grass, such as desaturation, overbright to make it lighter/ignore shadows, set the render order to avoid nasty AO artifacts, etc. Then I added my own custom shader which gave it wind (trees don't use wind on the default shaders unless their vertex colors are set properly). I made a grass patch in Blender that looked like this: The idea is to make a grass prefab patch and then use the tree editor to place it in. I came across this post which suggested a new method for painting grass on terrains-one that "looks better". And considering that's still only grass, it would be impossible to add other small details like flowers or plants using this system. I turned "Detail Resolution" up to max and got something like this (just an approximation because it's hard to get my old settings back): I looked into it and found the detail mesh options in the terrain settings. So was that it? Did I just have to stick with individual obvious grass planes and hope that it'll work out when I flesh out the asset library? No - I had to increase the density. No pun intended.Īfter adding a third grass texture I actually reached the limit of density for that area. And I got this:Ĭlearly this wasn't going to cut it either. So I tried to trick it: I added another grass object which was actually the same texture, so that I could add more of it in the same area. There's no way I could match the coverage of something like FFXV if this was the shortest distance grass can come in. The grass amount was coming in very sparse like this. So I made my own grass texture and placed it in. My first approach was to use Unity's Terrain "Grass Texture" tool, which just asks for a texture and lets you paint on planes. In the meantime, I went to work on grass. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone thinks this is what I should focus on. I have a feeling the texture really impacts how the ground looks with grass, but I've tried dozens of different textures from and some of them just really don't look great when they're tiled on this scale-unfortunately they're not very high res so I can't scale them up much further, but regardless that's a somewhat different problem entirely. I'm happy with the tools I have for sculpting, but I'm a little worried about the ground textures and mountain ranges not looking how I want them to. As of today, I'm working with a base terrain that looks like this:Īnd here's the area I'll be showing later on that I'm trying to work on: I did more research and got the new 2018 Terrain tool extension thing from Unity which has hotkeys for brushes and mountain shapes, as well as erosion tools which really helped me get that mountainous feel. The first results were horrendous because I only used a circle brush and made really smooth, ugly hills to act as mountains. Quickly I realized that there were limitations within Unity's Terrain system which could hinder the look I wanted to get.Īfter I prototyped the layout of my level, I added a terrain and started sculpting. My main point of reference was screenshots from Final Fantasy 15, specifically this image: I've been working on this exterior environment for a fantasy/sci fi game that I'm building and I'm aiming for a somewhat realistic artstyle. For the past several days I've spent like 90% of my waking hours trying to nail down a solid approach to this issue but everything I try just seems to come with it's own set of problems and it's hard to see a clean way to accomplish what I want here. Hi all, apologies for the long post but I want to get this discussion as complete as possible for the sake of being productive.
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