Introducing Grass

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.

Hello Roblox devs

You can now extend your world for realistic grass.
Thanks to all the roblox engineers who worked on it: @vrtblox, @c0de517e, @NeoBuilder101 and @ConvexRumbler. And special thanks to the art team: @RBLXImagineer and @CreatorusMaximus

When?
Grass is enabled in Studio for you to test it. After week or two we will enable it for all the clients.

How do I get it?
To enable grass select Workspace-> Terrain-> Decoration = true and all of your Terrain grass will now have a geometric grass.


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 :slight_smile:

footnote: The screenshot is from ROFTgame, who were using grass on gametest servers and let me use it here. Thanks

1050 Likes

They literally made grass from the game known as Real Life, wow…

But either way, congratulations roblox for adding in “3D’ish” grass that game devs alike can use, instead of the grass texture!

122 Likes

This is absolutely fantastic, I cannot express how much time has gone into making grass textures. Thank you for this truly epic feature!

67 Likes

Heck to the yes!

No more inserting particle emitters with a grass texture! =D

95 Likes

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!

57 Likes

How does this increase performance? I’m curious how this is improving older devices instead of slowing them down.

43 Likes

This changes the game, literally!

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!

126 Likes

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!

41 Likes

I’m curious about this too. Surely if adding grass doesnt directly drop performance how would it “increase” it?

27 Likes

Can we have some properties? Like Color3, or a texture property?

32 Likes

It currently changes based on the colour assigned to the Grass material under Terrain:

70 Likes

Looks amazing!


117 Likes

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.

35 Likes

I think it’s own Color3 property would be a nice contrast between that and the terrain though.

25 Likes

Looks awesome!

Quick question; is texture support for grass planned at all? It’d be nice to make it look a bit more natural :slightly_smiling_face:

94 Likes

Just wanna leave this here:

Huge thank you to the people who are working on this.

143 Likes

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.

34 Likes

It would be nice to be able to adjust grass’s height, width, and thickness in its own properties. But I liked it so far!

55 Likes

Oh my god. Can’t wait for all the adventure games with grass…

22 Likes

No, it does not currently obstruct rays.

24 Likes