How I Instantiated Grass For 3D Pixel Art in Unity

greetings everyone foliage brings life to a world and provides the scene with noise that makes it more vibrant our goal was to generate grass that is installed with minimal effort consumes relatively low Computing resources and is malleable to different areas and art styles we also want it to look good in this video I'll share the progress and approach with the system to install grass with minimal effort we need to place it automatically and our first problem is that we need to figure out with what Logic the positions are calculated I tried different variations that place the grass with weights according to a parallel map but ended up going with the simple solution of generating points along the terrain evenly with a density variable points generators were also given a random variance to their position and scale to give the grass a more natural feel later on I influenced the use of splat maps that terrains offer and the points are divided among them to provide the ability to generate different foliage on different types of terrain or none at all on the screen we can see rocks generated on the dirt and grass and flowers in the grass areas the performance is quite good as everything is instanced this means the objects don't interact with physics but provide visuals however because the measures are instanced it was quite struggled to get access to the positions in Shader graph to create the billboard style Shader [Music] the start of grass was inspired by tessellator who used a Sprite and instantiated quads to provide animated billboard grass the grass mesh is turned towards the camera and is colored based on the pixel on the terrain below it this is done by having a camera above the terrain that only sees the terrain and renders the color to a render texture that the grass Shader reads however this Shader could be added to do anything as it has been done with the rocks and flowers [Music] because my high level goal is to provide easy work building I plan to skip the Pixel Perfect calculations on all moving objects and instead just create a world with meshes and do my best to render it into pixel art however I understand that there could be improvements made here that I might end up reworking later on I'm happy though with my solution so far as it is quite malleable there are four layers on this platform to differentiate different zones and practically an infinite amount of types of foliage you can generate per layer the artist just needs to draw the meshes and paint the terrain accordingly in the future I plan to procedurally generate my own measures instead of the unity terrain system I've made the project ready for any mesh that can provide a Splat map height map and Bounds in addition to the different measures that the grass and other foliage need thanks for watching if you have any questions about specifics ask them below no answer and if you're interested in following the progress of this project like And subscribe bye foreign

Channel: Voyage

Views: 3,625

Keywords:

Id: i39Vee12FOE

Length: 4min 2sec (242 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023