Update 3 - Grass and Small Foliage

After I was happy with the snow material on the terrain, I decided to work on the grass and other foliage next. I spent some time researching the different methods of creating grass, and decided to use atlases and cards for my project.

I started with the grass. After importing my atlas textures into Maya, I assigned them to a plane, and then I created very basic flat cards for each blade of grass.

Next, I created several clumps of grass by combining different blades together in a triangle-shaped cluster. Then, I duplicated these clusters and rotated them around in order to create larger patches of grass.

I was pretty satisfied with the result, so I created a few more variations and then brought them into Unreal.

In Unreal, I created a material for the grass that had the albedo texture as well as the opacity mask on it. I made sure that the material was double-sided, so that the back of the grass cards would be visible.

I also added a simple grass wind node to the material. This node simulates wind and gives the grass some motion. This really helps bring the scene to life, as the grass seems to be reacting to wind, which makes the scene look more believable.

I then added the different clusters of grass to my foliage brush, and I was able to paint my grass into the area I needed. This was a great time saver, as I was able to avoid having to individually place each cluster into the scene.

I was really happy with the way the grass looked in the scene, so I moved on to creating my flowers. I took the same approach for the flowers, but I spent more time on the modeling to make sure the flowers did not look flat in my scene. I scattered them along with the grass, keeping my density pretty high, as I wanted the area to look colorful and lively.

After the flowers, I also created some fern models to add to the foliage. I modeled each leaf individually, then out combined them together to form the actual plant.

I placed them into my scene, but I made sure to only create a few of them, as I didn't want them to overpower the grass and the flowers, which they did initially.

I also created some sticks and placed them around the snow. This really helped with breaking up the clean white canvas of the snow material and added some nice variety to the scene.

At this point, I decided that I wasn't super happy with the way my lighting looked in the scene, so I played around with the rotation of my light source to make it look a bit better. Later in the project, I will redo the lighting in the scene to better fit my reference image and mood, but this will work for now.

I also decided that my block was a bit too far to the right of my scene, so I rotated the camera to center it a bit more. I also increased the density of the sticks coming out of the snow, as I felt that they were harder to see than I wanted.

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