So what is the verdict for low performance grass?

[RP_Games]

Hey everyone,

I'm just curious as to what people do for rendering grass on their terrain. I've tried using the standard Epic provided grass meshes, but those are pretty power hoggy. What's the best way to create 3d grass? I'm thinking of perhaps just creating a plane with a grass texture on it, but all those transparancies may drag down the system too. Thoughts?

[darthviper107]

If you're going to do that, make sure you use opacity mask rather than translucency. Opacity mask has much better performance and for things where you simply want it to be visible or not visible (no gray opacity) then it's the best choice.

Other than that, you can reduce your view distance for that grass or reduce the number of planes. Nothing else can be done.

[nabiul]

Which standard grass? I hope you didn't use the pivot painter example which is 8000 triangles and has overlapping light map uv's.

[RNG]

Combination of max view distance for grass and LOD abuse is the way to go. After a point, no matter how lightweight your grass model is, you're going to hit a wall. Take a look at Primal Carnage, it's a dinosaur game made with UDK, has loads of grass everywhere.