Update: We have disabled geometric grass over leafy grass material. We are not 100% sure if it is gonna stay this way. We are experimenting around. Using leafy grass as no-geometry grass could work for you guys as work around for painting geometry grass. On the other hand maybe you want 2 different grass colors. Please let us know what do you think.
Sure it is nice, but is it fast?
Yes! Shader for grass is much simpler than the one for the Terrain. This means that enabling grass has either absolutely no impact on your games performance or in case of very “grassy game” on older phone or tablet, it makes it about 2x faster. Bottom line is: You cannot hurt performance by enabling grass, only make it better.
Future plans
We are already working on or prototyping these features:
No specular on the terrain under the grass. Our main visual problem. Coming pretty soon (better then soon ™ right?)
Decoration painting: Allows you to paint where you want to have a geometry grass and where you dont want to. Currently in phase of prototype.
Decoration system: The grass is the first step of the complete decoration system where you should be able to automatically decorate any of our terrain materials with custom geometry. We are still working on specification of this system, so I’m not gonna provide much detail here on this one
footnote: The screenshot is from ROFTgame, who were using grass on gametest servers and let me use it here. Thanks
This feature is a revolutonary addition to roblox’s visual tools! This combined with PBR materials, shadowmap lighting, improved mesh collission boxes and a higher tri count cap for meshes will allow for console standard games visually speaking. Super excited for the future of this!
I noticed grass is placed on grass-water blended terrain which looks funky, but that wouldn’t be a problem anymore given the painting system that will come soon!
Grass in an open world RPG game would be so epic. Especially if there are eventually more settings and options for it like height, density, etc. Can’t wait to see where this will go!
Will this grass only be spawned on top of grass smooth terrain ? Considering its labeled under “decorations” for terrain, I can assume so, but I could see applications of this optimized grass as just its own “terrain” material to possibly paint on-top of bricks in the future.
Does this obstruct raycasting? Asking for a lot of friends with war games. The grass seems a bit tall and they’re concerned that it’ll block bullets going to and from other players.
