If I had to describe this method of making grass using the infamous "design triangle", I'd say it's "cheap" and "quick". Therefore, I cannot guarantee the highest quality straight off the bat. However, sometimes you just need to cover some ground. If you don't want to spend ages on googling images only to find ones that everyone's used (and seen) hundreds of times and/or you need a very particular type of grass - this tutorial is for you.

Disclaimer - I'm showing a very speedy version of this method. There's some horrendous stuff in my textures (like no padding, wasting space etc.) that I'm aware of. I'm choosing my battles here and for this project I needed somehow decent looking grass ASAP, without taking stuff like performance into consideration. It's up to you to tailor the following steps to achieve the quality you need. Enjoy!

INGREDIENTS

•  SpeedTree,
•  Any program that can produce a gradient image.

METHOD

1. You need a gradient or a gradient with a mask and a grayscale version of it for your subsurface scattering (if you want to have it).

I make mine in Substance 3D Designer and I like to add some kind of noise, but a flat gradient will do.

Throw these into the material in SpeedTree as your Color and Subsurface %. If you have an Opacity texture, you can throw it in too. I used the palette menu for Subsurface Color to set the colour up, it's quick and good enough for prototyping. You can set Gloss in the same way, just type in a value.

2. Create a Cutout of a grass blade. If you're feeling fancy or have to pay attention to performance, add LODs.

3. Now we need:

- a Tree and a Zone,

- a Trunk Tube,

- and a Frond.

4. Now you can set up a Camera and choose Export Material to get a texture set of your row of blades. You can choose which maps you want to save in the Export Material window.

5. Use your exported maps to create a new Material and a new Cutout

6. Repeat Step 3., but now create a couple of Zones and Trunks, to achieve some nice ground coverage. Generation Modes are definitely the most fiddly part of this method, but once you achieve the combination that works, you're all set.

7. Export your grass and check if it looks good in the engine, and tweak it if necessary.

Screenshots below come from my project made in Unreal 5:

I hope you liked this tutorial! Thank you for visiting my blog :)

For more examples of my work, please visit my portfolio page