Prepping in UDK

Erafic

Heya Polycount, been a while since I posted last time but now I'm back for another go. Last year was rough, but with this I'm starting anew and will be working getting my artistic momentum going again. I'm not sure if this is the kind of threads that are seen in the pimping and previews category, sure don't mean to post in the wrong place.

But now to what I'm actually working on. It is, for now, not a particular environment, rather I'm exploring UDK further as I plan to work on something larger further on. I thought gathering all this in a single thread would be more appreciated than asking a gazillion questions all over the place. During the last weekend I've been learning about landscape sculpting and texture painting on that, so right now I'm looking at foliage creation.



Now here we have my first attempt at creating foliage, something like grass tufts. But I havent really found a "great" tutorial for this, so some pieces are taken from here and there. But the things I cant quite understand here is why they arent "depth sorting". Some who are further away are drawn ontop. If someone know a good way to make nice foliage, or in this case grass straws, I'd be all ears.

dirigible

Hey Erafic. I'm not sure how much help I can be, but I'll share what I know. Transparency sorting is something that a lot of engines have trouble with, everything from maya to marmoset. I once helped someone create an environment asset that was covered in hay - made by using a ton of cards. In order to get the alpha sorting to work correctly I think we did some research, and wound up going into the material attributes to check a certain box, or two. If I recall correctly, one of the checkboxes is intended to be used for hair, but basically it improves alpha sorting.

I opened up UDK just now. It's under Transparency, it's the first checkbox "Two-sided Separate Pass". I would try turning that on for your grass material, and see if it helps.

dpaynter26

If you can get a subscription to 3dmotive, the creating foliage for udk tutorial is GREAT!

Erafic

Dirigible: Thanks a lot for the tip there, I tested running with Two-sided Separate Pass though I'm afraid it did little difference. Though I did notice shifting to Blend_Softmasked instead of Blend_Alphacomposite gave a more correct look so it might have been there that the fault was.

dpaynter26: Thanks for the tip, I've been thinking of subscribing for a while so I decided to go for it. Time to suck up that knowledge and come back with a better result than my meager first try at foliage