Grass is getting greener on this side! [GrassLength Studio Beta]

[LightBeamRays]

Hi Creators,

GrassLength is here! We’re super hyped to release our grass length feature in Studio Beta today! GrassLength allows you to make grass shorter or longer than it currently is. The density of grass is modulated with its length so it looks good and performs well at any length. Offering the GrassLength property is the first step in a long quest to provide more customization options for your landscapes.

At the moment GrassLength is a non-scriptable property. This is because we don’t intend for GrassLength to stay as a Terrain property in the long term. In the future, we plan to move it to offer you much more flexibility, such as the ability to edit density and have different lengths of grass in different regions of your worlds, among other things. We have more work to do before we can move this property to its final home and offer solutions to those use cases, but we still wanted to get something out to you as early as possible.

More details can be found in the GrassLength section of the Creator documentation.

Usage

To use the new GrassLength Property you need to enable the Studio Beta, scatter grass on your terrain and modify the GrassLength property under Workspace > Terrain > Appearance > GrassLength. The property is a floating point value of range 0.1 to 1.0. Those values are abstract and simply represent “smallest grass” and “longest grass”. By default, the GrassLength property has a value of 0.7, which corresponds to the grass length before this feature’s release.

1. Enable the GrassLength Studio Beta under File > Beta Features > Grass Length Customization.

2. Scatter grass on your terrain if you don’t already have some. First enable the Decoration property under Workspace > Terrain > Appearance > Decoration. Then use the Terrain Editor to paint your Terrain with the Grass Material. See how to add grass to your place here.

3. Change the length of your grass! Go to Workspace > Terrain > Appearance > GrassLength property and modulate your GrassLength using the provided slider or by entering a value directly in the property field.

Grass and Wind

If you have Global Wind enabled (Workspace > Behavior > GlobalWind), note that grass will bend a bit differently in the wind, depending on its length, to mimic a realistic simulation where shorter grass is a bit stiffer than longer grass. Learn more about Wind on our DevForum announcement and in Creator Documentation.

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Made with love

Thanks to @CaiusCosades0, @Polarporcupine, @ConvexRumbler, @Hyperhumanist, @Stingorc, @IgnisRBX, @Iriszh, @LightBeamRays, @Slim_Fandango, @Tnavarts, @kckhem, @C0de517e and @ProfessorKJM who all worked to bring GrassLength to you and prepare its future!

Please let us know about your experience with GrassLength and if you encounter any issues while in Studio Beta!

[Daw588]

Wonderful feature, indeed useful. But when can creators expect proper foliage support? There is many issues with how terrain is approached by Roblox:

1. Customization of terrain is constrained to the entire world: Creators are unable to change color, height, and other appearance properties per the surface area that they are modifying with brushes; as of result, they are unable to have one region where sand is red-ish, and other where sand is yellow-ish.
2. Limited materials: Creators are locked to limited set of materials. Creators can’t add more materials than what Roblox provided them with.
3. Limited foliage: Creators can’t create their own foliage, as they are locked to one foliage, which is grass that has one set of style that will not match every experiences’ choice of art style. Besides grass, there are far more many things such as wheat, flowers, leaves, and many more, but none of them can be added without custom foliage support.
4. Grid size is locked to 4x4x4: Creators can’t have a small detailed portion of terrain, and users are bound to notice where terrain connects geometry wise due to the size of the grid, which makes the terrain appear not smooth, despite its name.

I believe that those pain points of terrain should be addressed whenever possible, as they severely limit creators with what they can create on the platform.

[ne3ulimity]

This is an exciting update! I can’t wait to try out the GrassLength feature in Studio Beta. Being able to customize the length of grass adds a whole new level of detail and creativity to our landscapes.

[supertom145]

I was especially waiting for this. Let’s touch grass!

[Ron1n_Sim (Ronin)]

PLEASE make terrain length a thing with painting, instead of studio property values. And second. I sure hope this foliage features get applied to part grass as well. We need a bit more customization like grass texture changes, Grass recoloring and secondly. being able to implement more types of foliage rather than just the current one triangle grass we’re used to

[Disgustedorito (Disgustedorite)]

Will we also get the ability to have grass be colored differently in different locations? eg. dry, yellow grass and wet, green grass could realistically both be visible in the same scene if you have a river cutting through a savanna.

[ne3ulimity]

This.

For instance, we could have fields and normal lawns in the same game.

[PeZsmistic]

@LightBeamRays

At the moment GrassLength is a non-scriptable property. This is because we don’t intend for GrassLength to stay as a Terrain property in the long term.

Please, more of this. Give us short term solutions so we can achieve our goals now rather than waiting 5+ years. Most things can be migrated to a reasonable equivalent in a new system. This got such an applause at RDC because it was something people have been specifically asking for.

[focasds]

A really nice feature, just that it will affect the entire world according to what I just read. Which makes me wait until the final release of the entire decoration improvement.

If we could script this property, and then place it as deprecated in the future it would be good enough; since I can change the grass height depending on the region players are in. Like longer in the forest for example, and shorter around volcanos and stuff like that as we wait for all the other new features to come.

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Maybe a function like Terrain:AdjustGrass, which could be changed to allow for more things in the future? For example, as a second parameter in the future it could be a Region3 (or CFrame/Size, to know which grass to modify)

AdjustGrass(Length, …) → Future(…)

[Andrew_Hanover]

This is an amazing improvement I hope to see expanded in the near future! I love, and I repeat LOVE that the door has opened for this to be adjusted and expanded upon in the long term.

To change the color of grass in certain areas in a way that could fade, maybe so far as to the texture in certain areas, the mesh, wind influence in certain regions, things like these to better utilize it and improve the environments in my creations are something I keep yearning for.

I believe that the grass getting this added is a really good start and I hope to see more customization in the future to improve various aspects of environmental design on the platform. This is a really good start.

Good stuff!

[WoahItsJeebus (Jeebus)]

This is great! A bit overdue but great to finally have.

@LightBeamRays

In the future, we plan to move it to offer you much more flexibility, such as the ability to edit density and have different lengths of grass in different regions of your worlds, among other things.

This is now in addition to the reply from @focasds, because I also have concerns lol

Is there a timeframe in mind when this is going to its next phase? If this is a non-scriptable property, I can’t imagine how useful it’ll be to experiences with multiple types of scenery until the quote mentioned takes place.

Setting up your experience’s map for a global grass height— just to wait for a change that’ll force us to remake the map to be visually pleasing with varying grass heights seems counterintuitive. If it’s not impactful to performance at all grass heights, why not make the property scriptable? And give access to ReadVoxels on grass height within that region?

(Sorry if that’s a bit confusing. I have issues getting my thoughts on paper sometimes haha)

[BabulCNC (Babul)]

i’ve been playing with it for a few minutes, so far it looks promising.
however, when i change lenght from -0.1 to 1.0, the grass seems to increase size by only 2x, this seems odd.
my suggestions:
-rename “Lenght” to “Size”
-add real “Lenght” ^^
-add “Density” (for very short, but many leaves - like moss)
-make each voxel adjustable for grass lenght(+size etc) and wind direction/speed

thanks for the new toy hehe

[HaClix]

This update is very good but something that I think everbody wants is regional based settings where you can adjust the color and now the length of the grass in certain areas

[skaterite (dae)]

Loving the new beta feature so far.

[imdaros]

It’s crazy to me how publicized this feature is, in all honesty it’s around a couple paragraphs of C to adjust the top point of a triangles vertices.

Roblox is releasing a feature that should of been released upon the initial release of grass.

Grass length is nothing to brag about and seems like the bare minimum roblox could’ve made considering its multi billion dollar value.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

I asked about that in the last AMA:

@MightyDantheman

Will we get more control over terrain?

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Examples:

• More water properties, such as flow direction.
• Being able to modify water/grass uniquely from one area to another. (Non-global properties)
• Ability to edit voxel size. (Including smaller than 4 studs)

This was their response:

@skywise84

We’re currently focused on improving terrain’s performance and scalability. We’re always open to hearing feedback and suggestions from creators. If you have any specific asks around what type of controls you’d like to see, we’d love to hear it.

To which I responded with:

@MightyDantheman

@skywise84

If you have any specific asks around what type of controls you’d like to see, we’d love to hear it.

The main improvement I’d like to see for terrain is being able to adjust the properties of grass/water, and preferably all terrain, non-globally.

Additionally, I’d like to see terrain water work as a material that you can apply to a part. This would be incredibly useful, especially if that part can have unique water properties.

I would ask the same for decoration like grass being able to be applied to parts, but water is more important for me right now.

Sadly, nothing more was said on that topic.

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Regarding multiple material variants:

@PablitoTheChicken

Are there any plans to allow developers to use different material variants for terrain simultaneously? Currently, you are limited to using only one variant of each material for the entire game. Additionally, will you also enable us to paint the 3D grass over any material, rather than just the grass material?

@skywise84

Thank you for your question. We’re currently focused on improving our terrain’s overall performance and scalability. Internally, we’ve started to think about the future of materials on Roblox. This is a great request, and we’ll take note while we explore the best solution for all creators.

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For a full summary of all questions asked and answered, you can read more here:

Summary of the Creator Roadmap AMA (Oct 4, 2023)

[Fuserna (ImFuse)]

Man, I can’t wait for this!! I hope it’s good!

[XenoDenissboss1]

Man look, i don’t want to crap on anyone who worked on this but this update is just pretty… “mid”. Can i get some sort of explanation as to why something as simple as grass height had to get an entire RDC section only to STILL not even let us use it the same way it was used in that RDC section? Why wasn’t this sort of feature implemented by default when this sort of grass was first introduced? I 100% doubt it was some crazy internal technical limitation considering that i DOUBT any sort of programmer working on a grass shader will simply ignore the idea of having a grass length slider. Is this really the level of innovation were working with here?

Also, why can’t we edit the grass height at runtime? What was the idea behind this? Why lock it behind a studio locked property? I really cannot buy the idea that its simply a non-scriptable property just because it will get removed in god knows how many months/years. We might as well have everything we can get before that actual “removal” will happen but i guess not. I really do not get why almost every time were being given an update, said update MUST ALWAYS have some sort of weird and unreasonable limitation/limitations behind it.

[LootRPG (Den)]

@LightBeamRays

such as the ability to edit density and have different lengths of grass in different regions of your worlds, among other things.

Please tell me this will some day be real!