Grass

In this lesson I was taught how to make grass in Illustrator, edit it in Maya and then use it in Unreal. I started in Illustrator by drawing a few curves with the Pen Tool. I then thickened the points on each of them.

 

I then made a different layer and made the background black and the Grass curves white.

After this I made the Grass curves on the first layer green and saved twice hiding one layer at a time. Layer one as Grass01 and layer two as Grass02.

I next went to Maya and created an image plane. I scaled it up and then added a lambert material, looked in my files for Grass01 and applied it. Next I went to transparency and applied Grass02. The tuft is completly straight which is not realistic so I moved the vertices to give it more of a curve. The grass now looks realistic but it is only one tuft so i duplicated it and rotated each one. Now its a chunk of Grass and it is ready to export in Unreal. I exported it as an FBX.

This is the grass in Unreal

 

After I exported the Grass in Unreal I was also taught how to give it some realistic wind physics. Here is the screen grab of everything i connected in the material editor to add that effect.

Making this grass was useful as I am going to use it in my level. I am going to change the colour to fit the desert environment. I found the process relatively easy. The only bit I found hard was giving the grass wind physics in Unreal. It was hard to keep up with all of the different tabs being made. Out of the three packages I struggle the most on Unreal Engine. I did get there with applying the wind physics in the end. Everything in Illustrator and Maya was easy as it was just using Tools I am already comfortable with.