Simple Foliage
I tried creating some foliage for my outdoor environment scene I am working on as part of #XCXproj.
I haven't done foliage before and I have only worked a little with masked materials so I think I learned a lot of new things during these days.
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Currently the sway created by the world position offset doesn't look like I want it to so I will go back later and mask out parts of the planes with vertex painting to get better control over the movement.
I will also be Remaking the planes for the grass foliage form just a single plane per instance to a group of planes per instance. I initially intended to set up the grass material to make the plane always face the camera but after trying it out decided to not go with that.
A quick video render of the scene.
A bush and a large fern. Both are made out of planes with two sided materials using opacity masks.
The bush and fern seen from above.
The material setup of the bush.
With multiple parameters it is easy to create Material Instances that can be tweaked and adjusted.
The different types of grass. While originally in different shades of green, the SpeedTreeColourVariation node was used to alter the colour of each grass instance.
a low poly tree mesh with two-sided planes for the leaves.
I wasn't sure how much detail I should put into the mesh, but since it was not going to be very large and there would be many instances in the scene I decided to keep the polygon count low.
The tree in backlight.
All the foliage together. The tree is the same model with a different rotation and scale.