As Roblox has already mentioned there are no plans to support grass for parts, does anyone know of any alternative methods which will give a similar look with similar performance to Roblox grass.
The Problem:
So Roblox recently released the new grass update for smooth terrain grass. While I love this new feature and think it makes environments look more expansive than before, I have one problem with it. I can’t use it on parts. With the new Avatar Evolution updating coming out with the feature of normals maps and stuff, I already saw some devs making some cool terrain that looks way better than smooth terrain with the beta features. I want to be able to use terrain like this (made out of parts and mesh’s) but I still want the new grass on the grass parts of the terrain map.
Current solutions I am thinking of:
If I made a map, most of it probably would be filled with grass anyway. But I don’t want the limitation of smooth terrain, for example, if I ever wanted to make a muddy camp or something with the new update features.
Is there a way to blend part terrain and smooth terrain?
^ My problem with this solution is that this new grass update is still new and not fully completed. I am afraid that if I built a map within the next few months with this current version of the grass update, that I will have a hard time adapting to the new features of grass when they release.
What I’ve been doing is drawing the grass normally, and then raising the parts or map up to cover the terrain portion of the grass as much as possible. After that I continue on with the erode tool to further decrease the amount of visible terrain.
(I haven’t gone over the top portion with the erode tool in this screenshot, but you can see in the background that even without having done so it still looks pretty good from a distance.)
Yeah, this is a solution I have seen before. The only thing that concerns me is once again the adaptability of this feature. While I am grateful Roblox worked on something like this, they basically released an unfinished feature that could from this point go in any direction.
Can we replicate grass with parts or beams or something that won’t hurt performance too much?
What do you mean by unfinished? Every update ever on Roblox will technically never be finished, it can always be updated to be better. I think you’re overthinking this, if you really don’t want to use smooth terrain, you can always use mesh and mix it with bits of smooth terrain for grass. I’ve seen this pulled off decently well, at least with rock.
Unfortunately, nothing you can make will come close to looking like Roblox’s grass at the same performance. Their grass is a shader, which means there is pretty much no effect at all on performance. Parts and beams will be a lot more intensive especially if used a lot.
Sorry, unfinished may have been an over statement. I meant as in it looks lacking in way too many features compared to how it was originally portrayed.
So, if the grass Roblox uses is a shader, it still has to be on some part right? So does that mean ROBLOX has a bunch of thin planes sticking up from the smooth terrain with a grass shader on it? If so, can we not use the new up coming custom materials to use a mesh plane with grass strands on the plane?
I’m not sure the capabilities of the new custom materials, but I don’t expect them to come out in production versions of studio for quite a while still. You’re best just working with what there is for now.
