I really like it that you explain the reasoning behind every decision. It turns it from a tutorial on grass into an encyclopedia of tips that can be applied elsewhere as well.
Cheers Alex :) I always find tutorials just just explain the "what" and "how" but never go into depth on the "why" which sort of defeats the entire purpose of learning material. Without explaining the "why", all I'd be doing is teaching people how to follow tutorials haha. Thanks a tonne for the Patreon sub :)
Your a genius, thanks for this. I've been wondering why my grass looked so trashy. I literally scoured the internet trying to figure out why my grass was also flickering solid black randomly in places and couldn't find any examples whatsoever why it might be doing this until I just watched your video. You have answered so many questions that have been bothering me.
Glad it helped!! It can really suck when you've got an issue and don't even know what to search to try and solve it haha. If you ever have any other issues like that, feel free to ask for help in the Discord server :)
Dude you are a angel on earth. Its crazy how much effort you put to teach people whilst you are learning, developing your own first game and editing a dev log. Huge inspiration.
Cheers Cloudwolf :) Very very kind words! As a relative beginner myself I know how frustrating it is to run in to issues and not be able to find a solution so I'm always more than happy to share my experiences
Very handy tip on the grass shader, Thank you!! Let me return a bit of the knowledge that you might find useful. A trick you can do for the normals. Instead of duplicating the geometry and flipping the normals, you CAN have the shader use double sided mesh. The normals that get flip are local, so the gross orange you see is basically the normal map without the blue channel. What you can do in the material editor is this. Take a "twosidedsign" and plug it into the alpha of the lerp. Plug your regular normalmap into B, but multiply it by 1,1,-1 before plugging it into A. What this does is it flips the blue channel on the back side of the geometry, so you can create the grass with half the poly count. :)
I've been getting back into game development after a long hiatus due to financial strain. Finding your channel at this particular time has been an absolute godsend, as its allowed me to bridge my previous experience with stylized graphics in Unreal smoothly and confidently; I was literally looking for THIS very solution online and having no luck finding relevant articles on accurate (up-facing) Normal editing (a trick I used to do apply in Maya), and lo and behold you have another professional-quality video on the topic. Thank you so much for providing the fun and knowledgeable content you make and helping me get back to doing what I love. You'll be the first person I'll recommend to my friends and colleagues the next time they have questions about in-engine work in Unreal, and I'll no doubt be giving you a special shout-out once my current project is published. Thanks again!
A double sided material is actually telling the engine to generate faces on the other side, so it's literally no more expensive, it's just a faster way of getting the same result. Basically it's lazy. Using an RVT would be much more expensive than simply using a 2-sided mesh. I've actually found that poly modeling your grass is way more performant than using alpha materials as well because of the overdraw inherent with alpha materials. Even if you cut the mesh to reduce the overdraw, it's still more performant to actually fully model the grass. Especially with the clustering that you get with the foliage system. I even use foliage for background building placement in cities because the clusters are so helpful. I honestly wish you could use the foliage system on animated meshes for fur.
There is actually an Node Workaround for this: 3 Vector(with 1 Blue, 0 Red, 0 Green) plugged into Transform(World Space -> Local Space) into another Transform(Localspace -> Tangent Space) Into an VertexInterpolator(Because it's for InstancedMeshes) Multiplied by an TwoSidedSign The magic is that you Transform it to Local fist before to Tangent, and now the orientation is included in the Tangent normal, the VertexInterpolator is because it is InstancedGrass, and the TwoSidedSign makes sure that the normals are the same on each side (so u dont need to have duplicated vertecies on your Grass)
Eyyy that's pretty smart! I already made an amendment in the description about using Transform or TwoSidedSign to fix the back-facing faces of a Two-sided material, but this method circumvents the need to even author the normals in the first place. Nice stuff!
@@TheLegendOfTerry I actually made this method even better quality wise : you can blend a Grass normalmap with it to get pbr workflow back, kinda hard to explain In a few words
ohhh spectacular, I changed the normal ones as you indicated to test, and my grass looked good, but with your technique it looks amazing, thank you very much!!
Very nice tutorial! I've been transforming normals from world to tangent (the same as 0,0,1 and disabling tangent space normals in the mat) for as long as I can remember, this is a much more versatile and accurate approach to proper foliage normals! Great work!
Honestly I really love these videos, I usually don't comment on videos but I'm here just to say that I've been here since 1.30k subs. And I'm hoping you'll grow a lot more. You deserve it!
Cheers DesT, I really really appreciate that! I'd love to grow the channel as much as I can to help other beginner devs like myself haha. Hope to see you around :)
We don't deserv you man! You have a tutorial for everything and you explain everything so well for us beginners! So thank you for everything you're doing!!
I tried testing the double sided shader VS double sided geometry a few weeks ago to see what was more performant. I used a plane with millions of polygons. The double sided shader was noticeably more performant. But with grass I don't think it matters too much because it gets indtanced. You are far more knowledgeable than me tho. Love your content mate.
That's great to hear - I haven't actually run the numbers myself with instancing with double sided mesh VS double sided material - I think the overall performance wouldn't change but the memory usage would be better with a 2-sided Material
Cheers mate :) Since I'm using 100% of these methods in my own game, I always do my best to make sure it's scalable and performant (or at least warn everyone that it's costly etc)
Wanted to add - if you want to get a wee bit of material response on your grass, instead of it just being flat - you might notice that with the normals all vertical, the grass will have a gloss response like a flat table or ground surface. You can fix this by modifying the normals of the grass VERY VERY slightly so they no longer completely point upwards. The easiest way to do this is to create a flat plane under the patch of the grass (in your 3d app of choice, mine is Maya.. don't hate :P ), subdivide that plane, and then sculpt the plane a little bit so it is no longer flat. Then project the vertex normals from that plane, onto the grass. I found this gave better looking results than just manually modifying the vertex normals of the grass. In Maya there is a "transfer attributes" tool which works wonders for this. Not sure in Blender.
I only skimmed through the video. But at 9:42 try activating double sided material and multiply your normals with a TwoSidedSign node at the end rather than duplicating your mesh and see if that helps. I struggled with this issue for a long time but it's what solved most of my foliage rendering issues when trying to use two sided materials. Duplicating the mesh is quite an old-school solution, and an extra RVT does sound like a crazy solution but I like your thinking haha. Like I said, I didn't watch through the whole video so maybe I missed the reason as to why you had to duplicate the mesh. But using a vector 3 with value 0.0.1 and multiplying it with a TwoSidedSign should normally do the trick. But yeah, don't deactivate the tangent space and you still want your normals pointing upwards for grass like you explained here.
Heya Adrian! Your solution is something that I only found after posting this video haha. The solution I ended up going with was to plug a 0,0,1 vector in to a Transform Local to Worldspace node and then in to the Normal slot - basically the same thing if I'm not mistaken as it works with a single-sided mesh haha. I made an amendment in the description of the video but the custom normals are still essential :)
@@PrismaticaDev Oh sorry I missed that! Either way, I learned some nice things here so thanks for that. I haven't tried the transform local to world space solution but will check that out. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the world anyway. :D
This is a great simple method of achieving this style. I've fought with this in the past and ultimately ended up strong arming it using a cross product between the camera vector and the normal to flip the backward normals on the GPU. Not a great method and I wasn't very happy with it but I'm not much of a modeler and this method didn't occur to me. Thanks for this!
Hey I just wanted to ask what did you multiply in the make float3 where you stretch your downscaled grass. The second pin is a parameter. The first one? Thanks in advance!!!
I did the using the virtual texture normal thing and it does work. Idk if its more performant thoe. Interestingly applying it and then removing it from my material made using the upward facing normals work because they didn't make a different when I first applied them. Although now that i'm writing this I went to test the virtual texture to see if it performed better and the performance seems to be the same, but I can't get it to work without artifacts so it may not have worked and just randomly fixed whatever the other problem was. *shrug* As a side note you doing fantastic work, almost every one of your videos have been extremely useful. Thanks.
Hey Benny! Good to know that the method works haha although, sampling from an RVT can be a bit costly. But, if you're doing it anyway (which most of us are for our grass colour) then it doesn't add any overhead. Best of luck in your projects!!
I was reluctant on duplicating the faces for the cards, so I looked for alternatives and found that you can multiply a 0,0,1 (blue vector 3) with a "TwoSidedSign" node and connect it to normal, and it achieves almost the same result imo; another option I guess?
I wonder, what about Two Sided Sign node? I've been doing that to some meshes with weird lightmaps where on static lighting built I have one side of the mesh almost black and the other side is lit properly. And the Two Sided Sign node fixes that issue perfectly. I just multiple the node with my normal map before putting it in the Normal output.
Quick tip: Objects don't cast shadows if you have it scaled to low and it can cause some fake results when messing with the grass. Set it to medium at a minimum. I wasted two hours trying to figure out why shadows weren't being cast to my landscape lmao.
Also!! From what I know of a double sided material: it doesn't add vertices, but for each material on a mesh there's another draw call. So maybe a double sided material has two draw calls for a single material? I would assume. So not more vertices, but more draw calls. It probably balances out for performance either way.
I know this is an old video but thank you for the explanation. I have a question which I have only overcome indirectly. You have a lot of grass on your screen. I am assuming you are painting foliage. IF so how did you get so much foliage together. I have tried but even with the density set to 1000 and the radius at 0 UE5 foliage painter does not place the foliage packed together.
Hey there, how's it going? I need some help to solve a little problem, i'm trying to replicate the visual of your grass, but the lumen effects isn't allowing me to do so. Is there a way to disable the screen traces and short range ambient occlusion during the play time?
Hey there! Unfortunately Lumen is extremely limited in terms of creative control. It looks great but you can't adjust things like AO amount or Screen VS Global stuff. Maybe in the future it will be possible, but for now it's pretty much designed to be used as is.
If using the method in the description, you must fix all your normals to be pointing straight up. That means watch the part in the video starting at 5:10 !! The skip section is too long!!! @PrismaticaDev Also! if you rotated your grass in Blender make sure to apply the rotation before setting normals!
I just wanted to say that i needed to change "Source" to "Local Space" in the TransformVector Node as of the new update! (Maybe someone has the same problem as me)
Hmmm interesting! It might depend on how the Normals of your grass mesh are set up. If you have your grass "aligned to surface" AND they're manually pointed upwards in Blender then you'll want to use Tangent -> World. I think Local -> World is just the same as plugging the 0,0,1 normal into the normal slot
@@PrismaticaDev Yes, it's the same as just pluggin' in the 0,0,1 Vector, i needed to manually change the normals in blender so i can use tangent to world, all fixed now :D Btw. i'm really FUCKING thankful that i found your channel!
Hi All, Regarding the grass normals, none of this or anything else i found online would fix the issues with the grass normal always being 0,0,1 (straight up) and not matching the landscape as charlie shows at 3:00 mark. What i noticed is that either plugging in 0,0,1 or the RVT sampled landscape normal to the grass normal node gave me the same worldspace up normals all over. I tried all sorts of transforms but nothing worked. After experimentation, I found that the vertexnormalWS node was the only one that actually varied the normals based on the landscape slope. Eventually, I fixed my issue by importing a completely different grass mesh and then reimporting the old one. I think there was a bug or messed up setting when my mesh originally imported. Then, plugging the vertexnormalWS directly into my normal worked. Hope that helps somebody.
Hey, Pretty cool video! thanks! I've been working with stylized grass the past few days, and got pretty nice results using both transparent images or modeled grass with double face from blender, would you recomend it better to have the modeled grass instead of the transparent one? for some reason, using the modeled one made my fps drop by a lot and with "fewer" amount of grass than the opacity masked ones even using insane amounts of those, am I doing something wrong with the modeled ones? Thanks for any information! :D
Nice video, came back cause its about time to make grass, but this doesnt work or doesnt work anymore. Tried the double sided material and flip normal + dupe vert count, still same dark splotches/sides on material, Ive rechecked everything twice. Also tried with plane and each blade as mesh, same results :/ Sadly we live in 2021 and still have NO FOOLPROOF way to make foliage xD
Heya Andre! I made an update in the description of the video that might be similar to your method, although I'd love to hear your experiences about it either way :)
If you used the two sided flag in a material, couldn't you just multiply the normal with the sign of the face? That way the backwards normals would get flipped around to be the same as the normals you want.
You sure could as well - I didn't actually know about Signs/Side stuff until after I uploaded this haha. The current solution I have in the Description is a much more elegant solution + my diagonal grass solution makes for some Data saves :)
Double sided by duplication will waste vertex shader operations. Fixing the normal for the back sides in Shader would be better. Or, calculate the normal in another way. If you can export the mesh without normals the neetices will take less data and play better with cache memory too
Is the main concept here that the normals need to face upwards and be double sided? Could I do the normal fix in Maya and then use the double sided material in Unreal on a single mesh that wasn't combined with a flipped version of itself?
I did think about twosided sign and inverting one side of it! Many solutions to the same problem - it would be interesting to see a performance comparison between all solutions haha
could you cover landscapes? I am so afraid of them lol. Like how to place grass automatically on green bits, rock on others etc and maybe even meshes like sticks or small pebbles on some surface types? Would be really awesome. Any tutorials/vids would be awesome too
That's definitely something on my radar. I was thinking of doing a little series where we set up a really basic landscape (like the one I use in my game) and I explain all of the little challenges that come with it (like applying Automatic Grass to layers that automatically do Cliffs etc) so keep an eye out! I might even PLAN for it rather than completely wing it like I usually do haha
hello i need to build a house in BP with Geometry but i can't because it doesn't work i want to build a house like pubg house but in BP to safe any changes that i make at all the map without copy the house again a lot of times
If you're looking to have multiple of the same house just build it in the level, select all parts of the house and press control + g, which should turn the collection of selected objects into a group. Then you can just copy and paste the group around the map. You can also make groups within groups, like for example, you can set up a table surrounded with chairs and stuff on the table and turn that into a group, and you can join that group into the house group. I reckon this method would be much easier than creating blueprints that are more static and less editable.
@@047z you're right on the money - this is what I'd suggest. Groups within Groups are extremely handy as well - just make sure to have a good Folder Structure within your level! Haha
@@047z I did it but the problem here when I want to change some thing in the house I must copy this house again I need it to be like BP child when I change one thing it will also change to all houses in my map you understand yeah. Thanks
@@CP-Mohammed If you are going to be regularly changing the house then I suppose the actor BP would be the way to go. Its pretty easy to build stuff in there as well, just a bit finicky moving around the viewport at times. Making stuff in the actor blueprint is a lot like making stuff in the regular viewport, all the controls are the same. Basically just drag and plop stuff from the content manager into the actor viewport and bobs you're uncle. The main difference is that there's a hierarchy of components in the top left of the window which displays all the stuff you added in and what is tied to what, but it shouldn't really matter if the scales and everything are constant. I'd recommend looking into basic blueprint tutorials, the Unreal Engine youtube channel does one that'll show you how everything works.
i dont think using RVT normals would work very well because the grass meshes would get a kind of "stripey" decal-like projection of the normal texture that was applied to the landscape material. might work well if the landscape material is a flat colour without pixel normals.
Excellent video! I really appretiate your tutorials! I've followed the steps here and the results were pretty good (specially when combined with the cel shading post process - which I also learned about from your videos). Quick question: Although the lighting now looks a lot better, I'm trying to get this aspect of a really dense packed grass but mine still looks a bit sparse. Any advices on how to achieve a look like what you have in your video?
Hey Bernardo! Great question - I think the trick is to make the grass blend in with the landscape as much as possible, but then make the tips of the grass a tiny bit lighter (you could use Vertex Colour to lighten the tips if you're already using it for Wind) That way you get the benefits of subtle silhouettes AND grass blending with the landscape well. Makes for some really cool grass :) My grass density is around 200-400 from memory
Hi, love your tutorials. I had a question about the exporting process for grass with vertex color data. I'm using maya and my fbx file is not importing the vertex color data from maya to unreal... Do you happen to have a good tutorial regarding the process of creating grass from scratch and showing the import/export process?
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I really like it that you explain the reasoning behind every decision. It turns it from a tutorial on grass into an encyclopedia of tips that can be applied elsewhere as well.
Cheers Alex :) I always find tutorials just just explain the "what" and "how" but never go into depth on the "why" which sort of defeats the entire purpose of learning material. Without explaining the "why", all I'd be doing is teaching people how to follow tutorials haha. Thanks a tonne for the Patreon sub :)
Your a genius, thanks for this. I've been wondering why my grass looked so trashy. I literally scoured the internet trying to figure out why my grass was also flickering solid black randomly in places and couldn't find any examples whatsoever why it might be doing this until I just watched your video. You have answered so many questions that have been bothering me.
Glad it helped!! It can really suck when you've got an issue and don't even know what to search to try and solve it haha. If you ever have any other issues like that, feel free to ask for help in the Discord server :)
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks
Dude you are a angel on earth. Its crazy how much effort you put to teach people whilst you are learning, developing your own first game and editing a dev log. Huge inspiration.
Cheers Cloudwolf :) Very very kind words! As a relative beginner myself I know how frustrating it is to run in to issues and not be able to find a solution so I'm always more than happy to share my experiences
Hey y'all! I've made an amendment to this process in the description - apologies for the extra steps, thankfully there's an easier solution!
nice, even better :D, thanks for making it easier
Very handy tip on the grass shader, Thank you!! Let me return a bit of the knowledge that you might find useful. A trick you can do for the normals. Instead of duplicating the geometry and flipping the normals, you CAN have the shader use double sided mesh. The normals that get flip are local, so the gross orange you see is basically the normal map without the blue channel. What you can do in the material editor is this. Take a "twosidedsign" and plug it into the alpha of the lerp. Plug your regular normalmap into B, but multiply it by 1,1,-1 before plugging it into A. What this does is it flips the blue channel on the back side of the geometry, so you can create the grass with half the poly count. :)
I've been getting back into game development after a long hiatus due to financial strain. Finding your channel at this particular time has been an absolute godsend, as its allowed me to bridge my previous experience with stylized graphics in Unreal smoothly and confidently; I was literally looking for THIS very solution online and having no luck finding relevant articles on accurate (up-facing) Normal editing (a trick I used to do apply in Maya), and lo and behold you have another professional-quality video on the topic. Thank you so much for providing the fun and knowledgeable content you make and helping me get back to doing what I love. You'll be the first person I'll recommend to my friends and colleagues the next time they have questions about in-engine work in Unreal, and I'll no doubt be giving you a special shout-out once my current project is published. Thanks again!
I love the Runescape music behind your voice! Its perfect.
Haha it's my go-to playlist for when I'm working
A double sided material is actually telling the engine to generate faces on the other side, so it's literally no more expensive, it's just a faster way of getting the same result. Basically it's lazy. Using an RVT would be much more expensive than simply using a 2-sided mesh. I've actually found that poly modeling your grass is way more performant than using alpha materials as well because of the overdraw inherent with alpha materials. Even if you cut the mesh to reduce the overdraw, it's still more performant to actually fully model the grass. Especially with the clustering that you get with the foliage system. I even use foliage for background building placement in cities because the clusters are so helpful. I honestly wish you could use the foliage system on animated meshes for fur.
bro casually dropped the worlds greatest transition in the first 10 seconds and acted like we wouldn't notice
There is actually an Node Workaround for this:
3 Vector(with 1 Blue, 0 Red, 0 Green) plugged into Transform(World Space -> Local Space) into another Transform(Localspace -> Tangent Space) Into an VertexInterpolator(Because it's for InstancedMeshes) Multiplied by an TwoSidedSign
The magic is that you Transform it to Local fist before to Tangent, and now the orientation is included in the Tangent normal, the VertexInterpolator is because it is InstancedGrass, and the TwoSidedSign makes sure that the normals are the same on each side (so u dont need to have duplicated vertecies on your Grass)
Eyyy that's pretty smart! I already made an amendment in the description about using Transform or TwoSidedSign to fix the back-facing faces of a Two-sided material, but this method circumvents the need to even author the normals in the first place. Nice stuff!
@@PrismaticaDev may make a video about it
This tip is fire! Also, the doubled up mesh method gave me really whacky shadowing and had trouble with draw culling.
@@TheLegendOfTerry I actually made this method even better quality wise : you can blend a Grass normalmap with it to get pbr workflow back, kinda hard to explain In a few words
ohhh spectacular, I changed the normal ones as you indicated to test, and my grass looked good, but with your technique it looks amazing, thank you very much!!
Very nice tutorial! I've been transforming normals from world to tangent (the same as 0,0,1 and disabling tangent space normals in the mat) for as long as I can remember, this is a much more versatile and accurate approach to proper foliage normals! Great work!
Honestly I really love these videos, I usually don't comment on videos but I'm here just to say that I've been here since 1.30k subs. And I'm hoping you'll grow a lot more. You deserve it!
Cheers DesT, I really really appreciate that! I'd love to grow the channel as much as I can to help other beginner devs like myself haha. Hope to see you around :)
We don't deserv you man! You have a tutorial for everything and you explain everything so well for us beginners! So thank you for everything you're doing!!
I tried testing the double sided shader VS double sided geometry a few weeks ago to see what was more performant. I used a plane with millions of polygons. The double sided shader was noticeably more performant. But with grass I don't think it matters too much because it gets indtanced. You are far more knowledgeable than me tho. Love your content mate.
That's great to hear - I haven't actually run the numbers myself with instancing with double sided mesh VS double sided material - I think the overall performance wouldn't change but the memory usage would be better with a 2-sided Material
This was super cool! Great to see scalable solutions in tutorials. Way too many of them are hack-y narrow use cases.
Cheers mate :) Since I'm using 100% of these methods in my own game, I always do my best to make sure it's scalable and performant (or at least warn everyone that it's costly etc)
Wanted to add - if you want to get a wee bit of material response on your grass, instead of it just being flat - you might notice that with the normals all vertical, the grass will have a gloss response like a flat table or ground surface. You can fix this by modifying the normals of the grass VERY VERY slightly so they no longer completely point upwards. The easiest way to do this is to create a flat plane under the patch of the grass (in your 3d app of choice, mine is Maya.. don't hate :P ), subdivide that plane, and then sculpt the plane a little bit so it is no longer flat. Then project the vertex normals from that plane, onto the grass. I found this gave better looking results than just manually modifying the vertex normals of the grass. In Maya there is a "transfer attributes" tool which works wonders for this. Not sure in Blender.
I only skimmed through the video. But at 9:42 try activating double sided material and multiply your normals with a TwoSidedSign node at the end rather than duplicating your mesh and see if that helps. I struggled with this issue for a long time but it's what solved most of my foliage rendering issues when trying to use two sided materials. Duplicating the mesh is quite an old-school solution, and an extra RVT does sound like a crazy solution but I like your thinking haha. Like I said, I didn't watch through the whole video so maybe I missed the reason as to why you had to duplicate the mesh. But using a vector 3 with value 0.0.1 and multiplying it with a TwoSidedSign should normally do the trick. But yeah, don't deactivate the tangent space and you still want your normals pointing upwards for grass like you explained here.
Heya Adrian! Your solution is something that I only found after posting this video haha. The solution I ended up going with was to plug a 0,0,1 vector in to a Transform Local to Worldspace node and then in to the Normal slot - basically the same thing if I'm not mistaken as it works with a single-sided mesh haha. I made an amendment in the description of the video but the custom normals are still essential :)
@@PrismaticaDev Oh sorry I missed that! Either way, I learned some nice things here so thanks for that. I haven't tried the transform local to world space solution but will check that out. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the world anyway. :D
@@AdrianDrott No worries at all! I always appreciate the feedback :) Hope to see you around!
This is a great simple method of achieving this style. I've fought with this in the past and ultimately ended up strong arming it using a cross product between the camera vector and the normal to flip the backward normals on the GPU. Not a great method and I wasn't very happy with it but I'm not much of a modeler and this method didn't occur to me. Thanks for this!
Hey I just wanted to ask what did you multiply in the make float3 where you stretch your downscaled grass. The second pin is a parameter. The first one? Thanks in advance!!!
Another excellent video, you should way more subscribers. Keep going with these tuts and they will come!
Thank you very much! :) Don't forget to share with a friend
You have become a voice in my head. Congrats 👏
I did the using the virtual texture normal thing and it does work. Idk if its more performant thoe. Interestingly applying it and then removing it from my material made using the upward facing normals work because they didn't make a different when I first applied them. Although now that i'm writing this I went to test the virtual texture to see if it performed better and the performance seems to be the same, but I can't get it to work without artifacts so it may not have worked and just randomly fixed whatever the other problem was. *shrug*
As a side note you doing fantastic work, almost every one of your videos have been extremely useful. Thanks.
Hey Benny! Good to know that the method works haha although, sampling from an RVT can be a bit costly. But, if you're doing it anyway (which most of us are for our grass colour) then it doesn't add any overhead. Best of luck in your projects!!
I was reluctant on duplicating the faces for the cards, so I looked for alternatives and found that you can multiply a 0,0,1 (blue vector 3) with a "TwoSidedSign" node and connect it to normal, and it achieves almost the same result imo; another option I guess?
You just saved my Final Exam Submission!!!
For those of you who use Maya, this is as simple as clicking Set Vertex Normal and setting Z to 1 and X and Y to 0.
I wonder, what about Two Sided Sign node? I've been doing that to some meshes with weird lightmaps where on static lighting built I have one side of the mesh almost black and the other side is lit properly. And the Two Sided Sign node fixes that issue perfectly. I just multiple the node with my normal map before putting it in the Normal output.
Tysm, I was wondering why my grass looked extremely ugly. The grass had ugly dark grass, ruin the beautiful green grass which I was trying to get.
Quick tip: Objects don't cast shadows if you have it scaled to low and it can cause some fake results when messing with the grass. Set it to medium at a minimum. I wasted two hours trying to figure out why shadows weren't being cast to my landscape lmao.
Also!! From what I know of a double sided material: it doesn't add vertices, but for each material on a mesh there's another draw call. So maybe a double sided material has two draw calls for a single material? I would assume. So not more vertices, but more draw calls. It probably balances out for performance either way.
At 8:50 when you explain the upwards z offset, what is the first part of the multiply node connected to
Vertex Color
I know this is an old video but thank you for the explanation.
I have a question which I have only overcome indirectly. You have a lot of grass on your screen. I am assuming you are painting foliage. IF so how did you get so much foliage together. I have tried but even with the density set to 1000 and the radius at 0 UE5 foliage painter does not place the foliage packed together.
Thanks for the video!
Hey there, how's it going? I need some help to solve a little problem, i'm trying to replicate the visual of your grass, but the lumen effects isn't allowing me to do so. Is there a way to disable the screen traces and short range ambient occlusion during the play time?
Hey there!
Unfortunately Lumen is extremely limited in terms of creative control. It looks great but you can't adjust things like AO amount or Screen VS Global stuff. Maybe in the future it will be possible, but for now it's pretty much designed to be used as is.
If using the method in the description, you must fix all your normals to be pointing straight up. That means watch the part in the video starting at 5:10 !!
The skip section is too long!!! @PrismaticaDev
Also! if you rotated your grass in Blender make sure to apply the rotation before setting normals!
I just wanted to say that i needed to change "Source" to "Local Space" in the TransformVector Node as of the new update! (Maybe someone has the same problem as me)
Hmmm interesting! It might depend on how the Normals of your grass mesh are set up. If you have your grass "aligned to surface" AND they're manually pointed upwards in Blender then you'll want to use Tangent -> World. I think Local -> World is just the same as plugging the 0,0,1 normal into the normal slot
@@PrismaticaDev Yes, it's the same as just pluggin' in the 0,0,1 Vector, i needed to manually change the normals in blender so i can use tangent to world, all fixed now :D
Btw. i'm really FUCKING thankful that i found your channel!
Hi All,
Regarding the grass normals, none of this or anything else i found online would fix the issues with the grass normal always being 0,0,1 (straight up) and not matching the landscape as charlie shows at 3:00 mark.
What i noticed is that either plugging in 0,0,1 or the RVT sampled landscape normal to the grass normal node gave me the same worldspace up normals all over. I tried all sorts of transforms but nothing worked.
After experimentation, I found that the vertexnormalWS node was the only one that actually varied the normals based on the landscape slope. Eventually, I fixed my issue by importing a completely different grass mesh and then reimporting the old one. I think there was a bug or messed up setting when my mesh originally imported. Then, plugging the vertexnormalWS directly into my normal worked.
Hope that helps somebody.
Almost right. But the duplicating is not necessari. You can just flip the blackface normal.
invaluable help! thank you!
this was great! Thanks
No worries! Glad you found it useful :)
you're a giant ♥️
Awesome!
You’re awesome :)
HELP IN MY CASE WHEN I PUT THE VALUE IN THE Z TO POINT THE NORMALS ,THE NORMALS ARE NOT FACING UPWARS
Hey Guri - you'll need to be a little more specific haha. If you'd like to share some screenshots in discord I'll be able to help :)
@@PrismaticaDev ok
@@PrismaticaDev but how can i find you in discord
@@gursimransingh8726 there's a link in the video description :)
Thank you very much!
No worries at all Alex :) Hope it helped!
Hey, Pretty cool video! thanks! I've been working with stylized grass the past few days, and got pretty nice results using both transparent images or modeled grass with double face from blender, would you recomend it better to have the modeled grass instead of the transparent one? for some reason, using the modeled one made my fps drop by a lot and with "fewer" amount of grass than the opacity masked ones even using insane amounts of those, am I doing something wrong with the modeled ones? Thanks for any information! :D
If instead of 0.0.1 set 0.22, 0.22, 1, then the normals will look up
Hi! Have u got a tutorial for the grass material ?
Look for my Wind system tutorial, my Grass colour tutorial and my Grass occlusion tutorial :)
@@PrismaticaDev Thank you!(and also ty for responding so fast lol) 😃
What if you use object space Z axis and plug it into a normal?
Would have to test it and see - I'm not 100% sure how Object Space works with instances
Nice video, came back cause its about time to make grass, but this doesnt work or doesnt work anymore.
Tried the double sided material and flip normal + dupe vert count, still same dark splotches/sides on material, Ive rechecked everything twice.
Also tried with plane and each blade as mesh, same results :/
Sadly we live in 2021 and still have NO FOOLPROOF way to make foliage xD
Hmmmm very weird!! Mind chucking me a message on discord with a screenie of your material and mesh? And we'll be able to figure it out for sure :)
SIIIIIIIICK!
Cute cat
How did you become a wizard.
I eat my vegetables
Wow! I have had this issue since UDK. Thank you!! Liked, subscribed, rang that bell. Let's be friends! 💯🦊
Where is the align normal?
Here you go :) It's named differently depending on if you're painting foliage or using Landscape Grass imgur.com/a/PhqQ0jE
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks! And thank you for doing what you are doing!
@@ArchonsGame no worries at all! :) If you ever need a hand with anything check out our Discord server - a tonne of helpful people in there 24/7
nice
I'm only 3 seconds in and I already wanna fire up my old OSRS account :(
Hey I know a better way to do this IN-ENGINE!
I can show you
👀 show
Heya Andre! I made an update in the description of the video that might be similar to your method, although I'd love to hear your experiences about it either way :)
@@PrismaticaDev I'll take a look, but thanks for the video man, i love your content!
the rc vibes is distracting
If you used the two sided flag in a material, couldn't you just multiply the normal with the sign of the face? That way the backwards normals would get flipped around to be the same as the normals you want.
You sure could as well - I didn't actually know about Signs/Side stuff until after I uploaded this haha. The current solution I have in the Description is a much more elegant solution + my diagonal grass solution makes for some Data saves :)
One Weird Trick! Doctors hate him!
Double sided by duplication will waste vertex shader operations. Fixing the normal for the back sides in Shader would be better. Or, calculate the normal in another way. If you can export the mesh without normals the neetices will take less data and play better with cache memory too
There's an amendment in the description just for that :)
Awesome, I was using the cursed 0,0,1 normals on my grass, now they look nice at any angle :D, ty ♥
Fantastic! Glad to hear it :)
Is the main concept here that the normals need to face upwards and be double sided? Could I do the normal fix in Maya and then use the double sided material in Unreal on a single mesh that wasn't combined with a flipped version of itself?
Nice! I think it also can work well with twosided shader, and normals multiplied by twosided sign node
I did think about twosided sign and inverting one side of it! Many solutions to the same problem - it would be interesting to see a performance comparison between all solutions haha
could you cover landscapes? I am so afraid of them lol. Like how to place grass automatically on green bits, rock on others etc and maybe even meshes like sticks or small pebbles on some surface types? Would be really awesome. Any tutorials/vids would be awesome too
That's definitely something on my radar. I was thinking of doing a little series where we set up a really basic landscape (like the one I use in my game) and I explain all of the little challenges that come with it (like applying Automatic Grass to layers that automatically do Cliffs etc) so keep an eye out! I might even PLAN for it rather than completely wing it like I usually do haha
@@PrismaticaDev that would be total ace dude i love your style
.
Thank you so much man! been having this issue for months, never could find a fix for it
this shit took me 6 months to figure out by myself. AT LEAST X_x thanks for the confirmation. thats what i thought it may have been.
hello i need to build a house in BP with Geometry but i can't because it doesn't work i want to build a house like pubg house but in BP to safe any changes that i make at all the map without copy the house again a lot of times
If you're looking to have multiple of the same house just build it in the level, select all parts of the house and press control + g, which should turn the collection of selected objects into a group. Then you can just copy and paste the group around the map. You can also make groups within groups, like for example, you can set up a table surrounded with chairs and stuff on the table and turn that into a group, and you can join that group into the house group.
I reckon this method would be much easier than creating blueprints that are more static and less editable.
@@047z you're right on the money - this is what I'd suggest. Groups within Groups are extremely handy as well - just make sure to have a good Folder Structure within your level! Haha
@@047z I did it but the problem here when I want to change some thing in the house I must copy this house again I need it to be like BP child when I change one thing it will also change to all houses in my map you understand yeah. Thanks
@@CP-Mohammed If you are going to be regularly changing the house then I suppose the actor BP would be the way to go. Its pretty easy to build stuff in there as well, just a bit finicky moving around the viewport at times. Making stuff in the actor blueprint is a lot like making stuff in the regular viewport, all the controls are the same. Basically just drag and plop stuff from the content manager into the actor viewport and bobs you're uncle. The main difference is that there's a hierarchy of components in the top left of the window which displays all the stuff you added in and what is tied to what, but it shouldn't really matter if the scales and everything are constant. I'd recommend looking into basic blueprint tutorials, the Unreal Engine youtube channel does one that'll show you how everything works.
runescape any one?
i dont think using RVT normals would work very well because the grass meshes would get a kind of "stripey" decal-like projection of the normal texture that was applied to the landscape material. might work well if the landscape material is a flat colour without pixel normals.
Haha yes indeed. Although, if the RVT was a low enough resolution it could be blurry enough to work. Either way, there are better solutions haha
yeah-h-h, d-u-u-d-e, that was awesome!
You're awesome ;)
❤❤❤
Excellent video! I really appretiate your tutorials! I've followed the steps here and the results were pretty good (specially when combined with the cel shading post process - which I also learned about from your videos). Quick question: Although the lighting now looks a lot better, I'm trying to get this aspect of a really dense packed grass but mine still looks a bit sparse. Any advices on how to achieve a look like what you have in your video?
Hey Bernardo! Great question - I think the trick is to make the grass blend in with the landscape as much as possible, but then make the tips of the grass a tiny bit lighter (you could use Vertex Colour to lighten the tips if you're already using it for Wind)
That way you get the benefits of subtle silhouettes AND grass blending with the landscape well. Makes for some really cool grass :) My grass density is around 200-400 from memory
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks! I will try that!
fishing levels?
91, hbu??
@@PrismaticaDev 62 going for sharks
@@mecklefeckle8569 veeery nice. Great money maker ;)
Ugh you saved my life. Love you xoxo
Any time at all! :) If you need any help, don't forget to be in our Discord for some 1-on-1 assistance
Hi, love your tutorials. I had a question about the exporting process for grass with vertex color data. I'm using maya and my fbx file is not importing the vertex color data from maya to unreal... Do you happen to have a good tutorial regarding the process of creating grass from scratch and showing the import/export process?
Hey hey - most likely the vertex data is getting lost on Import to UE due to import settings
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks
Noice
you are xoxo
beautiful!
You are
You are really great with explaining things❤️