I've been trying to figure out the best foliage creation workflow for myself and I think i'm getting closer to something i'm comfortable with. So, I made the grass with Zbrush Fibermesh and baked the Normal, Vertex Color, Alpha, and Cavity map using Xnormal. Then I made two low poly cards inside of Maya, exported them and placed them procedurally with SpeedTree's generation tools. This single patch is 264 tris. Soon i'll move onto trees and other plants but in the meantime, check out these screenshots.
That grass looks amazing! Probably the most realistic I've seen.
I've been trying to figure out a way to make grass perform better in UE4. The big chokepoint for me is the overlapping transparency that UE4 hates. If you have a big field of grass, framerate plummets.
Replies
I like the result. Did you make tall grass with similar workflow(ZBrush FiberMesh --> Bake Maps)?
Can you tell us more about the Zbrush Fibermesh approach?
I've been trying to figure out a way to make grass perform better in UE4. The big chokepoint for me is the overlapping transparency that UE4 hates. If you have a big field of grass, framerate plummets.