Introducing Grass

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That image is incredible, if I was an outsider and didn’t know it was Roblox I’d believe it was a real place. Definitely a desktop background picture

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Will the grass length and grass color be configurable?

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Finally a major set forward!! All we need now is a way to change the wave size, color, speed, etc in certain regions!

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The Terrain.Decoration property is temporary, as part of getting this feature out the door before the end of the year.

The property itself cannot be read or written by scripts, and I suspect they will hide this property once they have a better system in place for customizing the grass and other similar effects.

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Really cool project! However there are some pretty big limitations that upset our team and really hold back its potential.

I’ve shared this here before but our game has had an interactive grass system for awhile. While the code is completely performant, the more dense we have our grass there is going to be render and physics issues piling up.

For that reason this grass is pretty neat, and even looks pretty decent combined with our grass(if we make some color adjustments)

Ours:

Ours + Roblox’s(without color adjustments)

We were considering switching over to roblox’s grass completely(because there’s no way we can make grass that improves performance! :smiley:) but there are a few things we dislike which is why we are going to currently keep ours.

The Issues

  • You cannot choose where grass is and where grass isn’t, unless you paint dirt etc.
    This is important because while dense grass looks cool, it doesn’t always make sense to have it everywhere, the more variation the better.

  • You cannot adjust grass height
    Good looking grass is grass with a lot of variation. If we were able to add more variation to the height it’d already look much better.
    We also may want certain areas to have completely different grass heights. For example in our swamp biome we have very tall grass where gators and snakes can hide.

This is currently not possible.

  • Grass Color is constant, and not painted
    While I understand that this is more convenient for a lot of people, it gives you a lot less control. Similar to grass height, grass color should not be constant everywhere. We should be able to control it. Using the swamp example again, we should be able to paint the grass to be darker there. While different lighting settings help a bit, it’s not enough.

  • No control over entities which can interact with the grass
    Possibly one of the most dissappointing limitations as of now is we have this beautiful grass shader that can flow in the wind… that we can’t control. We also can’t control how it interacts with other entities we may want, such as animals walking through it, or trains passing by. This could really heighten the level of detail and immersion

Solutions for this:

  • Let the windpower be adjustable, as well as wind direction
  • Let us create entities somehow that can push grass toward a specific direction and with a specific force

One more thing: I notice the grass draw distance is pretty small for max graphics settings.

It’d be nice for us to be able to control this somehow for our individual machines. My 1080ti should be able to handle a lot more than this. Not super important but would be cool!

Sorry for such the long post, but I thought I’d share some criticism/insight to make this more worth using for developers who want absolute control over something as important as this.

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The original post states these limitations are temporary and will be addressed in a future update!

This is just a first stage introduction which gets the bare-bones option out the door for people to use. Stay tuned :slight_smile:!

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Yeah of course :+1: , I just wanted to post anyways to make sure there wasn’t anything they potentially overlooked

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Really amazing, but will we be able to add our own meshes and textures in the near future?

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Wow! Super cool. I think it would be nice to have some tools to paint on terrain decoration regardless of material though (especially in the future with custom decoration geometry), since it only spawns on Grass material right now. A use case for this would be people who want to paint on small grass patches, but not actually flood all of the terrain material with it. Super neat feature though! I can’t wait to start using it!

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This is amazing!! Cant wait to replace my pesky particle emitters :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh also: May I humbly suggest adding wheat as similar decoration?

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This update will be HUGE for the roblox community. Usually I would have to use a grass plugin or need to build grass by hand! I have been personally been waiting for this update for years and can’t wait to use it.

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This looks awesome but I have 1 minor problem.

When I activate Decoration on the Terrain, I get this in my place.
image

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Absolutely amazing update!
works well with any kind of grassy plain scenery

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I feel bad for some plugins, going to be honest. People spent a bunch of time making grass plugins, and now we have this; but this is amazing!

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I mean grass plugins will still have their uses to add variation in the type of grass. Not all of them look the same.

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I noticed that the screen-space ambient occlusion applied at graphics level 10 results in a very noisy image when viewing a large patch of grass from a decent distance in a top-down angle. Would it be possible to turn off AO post-processing specifically for grass in graphics 10? I find that dropping to graphics 9 actually results in a much more temporally cohesive, pleasing image, which should not be the case.

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True, but since roblox comes out with thier own, most people wouldn’t know that there would be grass plugins made, and just go with the roblox made one, what I’m trying to say is that the Plugins won’t get as much attention.

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Roblox, now with actual grass!

Only one question is, can we mow it?

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Will we be able to add and remove grass at runtime?

I have a camping game called Backpacking, it would be vital to remove the grass under tents so it doesn’t peak through the floor of the tent.

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