SpeedTree for Grass - Question

[Blades]

I've heard of a few people using SpeedTree to do their tall grass. Is it possible to use SpeedTree to create grass as well? How would I accomplish this? Would I have to draw it manually? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I've tried searching the topic, but I can't find much info.

[Blades]

I got a interesting result by just adding leaves without a trunk. Is this how you do it? Or am I going crazy? Is there a way you can make the leaves face one way instead of panning along with the camera movement? (I don't really know what this is called)

If this isn't a good way to do it, what is?

[musilowski]

Why not just model simple blades of grass and animate the material? Would be easier on the hardware too...

[ThePriest909]

First you can make a basic mesh based on how the grass usually grows.
This is an example of it:

Note that speed-tree will read it in y axis and you 're gon'a have to turn it around in max before exporting it as object.
Start a new tree in speed-tree editor and add leaves directly on it. Then import your custom mesh and use that one instead of the normal leaves.
The next thing you need is a texture. You can make something simple in photoshop and use an alpha channel to mask it. A very very basic example of a grass texture:

The problems coming with it though is game's performance since I haven't found a way yet to use speed tree as foliage, and deco layers don't support the "fade out" function like foliage does.
What I did though is to make the speedgrass taller and place it only in some specific areas of my maps just as an additional realism factor while for the rest of it I used only simple static foliage.
I hope this helps.

This is how it looks:

[Denny]

Why not do a nice looking static mesh and make use of FoliageFactory? FoliageFactory allows for fade out and wind simulation.

[ThePriest909]

Denny is right on this. Although speed grass is looking more realistic in many ways, at least as far as this concerns UDK doing it the Foliage way is the best option we have for performance's sake.

[Blades]

Thank you for the replies everyone.