Grass Asset Setup

Overview

Grass objects are set up similarly to other vegetation objects. Please check the documentation for for further information.

Preparation

Typically there are two ways of application for grass objects within CryENGINE, manually placed grass and grass automatically placed as .

Below you can see a typical scene where big grass objects were used to cover a big area:

This is the wireframe view of the used model:

Arrange the grass polygons in a hexagonal shape to allow for better tiling:

Manually Placing Grass

Level artists manually place their grass objects to have greater control and variety. This works both for big areas as well as smaller areas with detail grass placed, i.e. around a rock or tree.

For smaller levels, this has the advantage to save 8 MB of cache memory, which would be needed for procedural vegetation system.

Object Setup in the Vegetation Tool

The setup in Sandbox is similar to all the other vegetation objects - please refer to the following link for more information on the Vegetation Tool:.

This setup explains how to set up a big grass patch, but you can also set up smaller vegetation/grass objects for areas requiring more detail.

Basic Setup

Create a hexagonal shaped setup of single sided polygons. Do not exceed a diameter of 8ms for big grass patches. This size proved to provide a good balance between performance and coverage. check the picture below to get an idea about the placement.

Creating Grass in Maya

Before beginning, remember to keep your work area in the section of the CryENGINE you will be using. For example, if you will be creating objects, your scene should be saved in: CryENGINE3\Game\Objects.

To start out; make your grass textures with an alpha map.

Next, apply your grass texture to the Phong shader you will be using.

Create a polygon plane and apply your Phong shader to it. Using the UV texture editor as reference, adjust your mesh to only accommodate the texture space being used.