I use particle emitters for a grass effects, certain elements make it sway. If you do it right, it looks great. On the other hand, it is very possible the grass comes out in an uncanny way.
@Veov_Ekdosi see below, you replied quicker than I did
OP, just to remove the confusion you have about instancing, you’re slightly correct with “parts are better than meshes because of instancing” but only instanced parts vs instanced meshes. Meshes are better to use if one mesh can replace “x” (undefined because there are variables in complexity and amounts) amount of parts and still serve the same purpose.
Collisions are usually better too, as Veov said - but they’re getting better. Currently if the player can collide with this grass (even with CanCollide = false a collision calculation is made), it’s usually best to make a large-ish grass mesh with CollisionFidelity set to Box and CanCollide = false. Obviously a single “box” is better to collide with than potentially dozens of grass parts.
With instancing, true this is what’s rendered, but it’s pretty minor when it’s the same mesh.
In conclusion - and I’ve said this before in many of my posts - the best and only way to know how your game performs under different methods is to test it. There are too many variables to account for for any single one answer. So test it out with a bunch, and see what works.
So this means with a greater amount of grash per mesh, Collision = False, and Collision Fidelity = Box we should be able to have grass for a kind of large scale map? x)
With a good LoD system handling the meshes, theoretically you could keep is pretty minor on performance. I wouldn’t suggest it without a lot of testing before dedicating an entire map though. If you do, I’d very much like to see your performance stats
Just tried it out - I have a toaster and it worked fine until I looked in the direction of the grass. I did mention including an LoD system, which would make this much more practical.
Is there a purpose you want to add this dense grass around anyways? It isn’t really necessary and also isn’t visually pleasing either unless you work to make it pleasing (which brings its own opportunity costs). In my experience, I’ve found that less is more when adding grass - you don’t need to include every blade haha.
Jaja, yeah but there are times when you want to make a really cool forest and the grass is the last thing that adds to immersion, specially considering there arent any new Materials which is kind of frustrating.
I think we must have to wait until they release the LoD system for Meshes later this year.
Disable your dedicated graphics card when you’re doing these tests. An i5 has on-board graphics, so use that to render the scene. This will be what 50% of your users experience.