Grass in DOTA 2

Tobbo

I'm really curious what everyone thinks about the grass in DOTA 2? Does anybody have any thoughts of how it was achieved? Multiple textures? All grass assets? Or do you think all of the ground itself is several large meshes and each part is unique and individually painted without the use of the same textures?

I can tell that the flowers, and some of the grass are actual assets, due to the shadows, etc. But I'm curious about the rest of it as it blends in so well.

Would it be possible to achieve something like that with just a few textures?

Any thoughts?

Rai

I know they use several texture layers (4-5?) that are blended pretty well together with their own shader.. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/WorldVertexTransition

Aside from that, it's just attention to color palette with assets blending in with the terrain.

Also the fact that the game uses a single perspective, helps with their positioning of the assets so they only really need to make it look good from one angle.

My guess at least.

MaVCArt

judging from what we do at work this look is achieved by multiple usage of both what Rai says, namely multiple texture layers (probably terrain painting layers like you have in UDK), and the usage of alphas on those textures to make them blend in a certain way, in this case probably by the height of the grass strands.

this, in addition to attention to color palette, like Rai said, and a good usage of overall materials achieves this final result and is probably why it looks so good

also, it's valve.

Minato

Inside Unreal Engine something like that would be achievable either through using a Terrain(Landscape) for the base using either an alpha blended or texture weight blended materials,and then using the foliage system to paint foliage meshes on top of that,OR through using a static mesh with vertex painting on it to combine and blend the textures(which is the same thing that Rai pointed to),and again using the foliage system on top of that...

Jarvgrimr

I'm working on a project that needs a similar style of grass, except even more simplified.

Does anyone have access to the stamps/maps they use for this? I'd love to see how they do theirs, and how the blending works...

Eric Chadwick

Jarvgrimr wrote: »

Does anyone have access to the stamps/maps they use for this? I'd love to see how they do theirs, and how the blending works...

Some methods here
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1852983#post1852983

You won't get the blending shader, and probably not the vertex color either, but you might be able to extract the textures.

passerby

it's a vertex blend between 2 or more textures, that has a extra texture with 2 channels to define what ares blend in first, and the fall off.

than there appears to be some good old fashion decals for tufts of grass placed by the LD.

if you are doing this for UDK, i can show you a material function i made a long while back that does exactly this in a more versatile way, since i got paintable influence and paintable falloff.

a good way to make the texture map to go along with it is to use a baked heightmap, or hand painted hight map, so you can have things fill low areas / crevices first.