Paint Effects + game art

Mitz

Hi there! long time lurker, and newbie poster here . I was just wondering, after playing around with various paint effects like Grass and various plants, I was wondering how compatible and effective would it be to bring it into a game engine (ie: Unreal)? due to it using a built in material in maya and not a texture file (like a .tga) would that be a problem transferring it into a game engine?

Also if this isn't possible, would anyone be able to link me a good tutorial on how to do really good grass? I know the basics of it (putting a grass alpha on planes) but I just can't seem to make it look believable in composition .

thanks in advance!

gamedev

You could actually use paintfx then save out your canvas w/ an alpha and use that as a texture. You could map the texture to planes or other meshes to create the look you want.

You'll get a super nice and clean alpha and it's really quick to make some foliage.

-Tyler

Rurouni Strife

You can actually also use the grass meshes as well. You would create your FX and then go to Modify-Convert-PaintFX to Polygons or something similar. Since it still uses a shader you would have a shader slot already created in an engine like UDK, you'd just have to play with the second UV channel for lightmaps.

The problem is that when you do those conversions, you get a really high polycount unless you specify it to be lower, and you'll still have one blade of grass use like 12 tris versus a plane that is 2. It'll eventually eat at your performance. The correct way of doing things is like how gamedev says.

Mitz

hmm i guess there's no going around it

thanks for the response! i'll give what gamedev said a try, although i don't quite understand what you he meant about "saving out my canvas w/ an alpha and using that as a texture".

does that mean render it out as a png with nothing in the background?

ZacD

No, if you want to go that direction, you should render out a diffuse texture as targa with a green background that matches the the grass color, then render out a frame where the grass is white and the background is black, then add it to the alpha channel in photoshop.

Autocon

I make my alpha first, get that looking awesome then doing texturing so I dont have to redo the texture/alpha if its not looking right. Very easy to slap some 10second green/brown colors for the difuse when testing out the alpha.

I also do this with trees.