Creating Grass

Next I am going to create grass for my landscape using Maya and Photoshop.  Again, this process is very similar to creating the palm trees and I will simply apply an alpha channel to the leaf to eliminate any halo effect around my grass texture so that there will not be a visible white outline around my grass when I have exported it into UE4.  After this I saved my texture and exported it into Maya.  From there I used the sculpting within Maya to create grass clump variations.  To do this I duplicated my grass texture that I imported from Photoshop and changed the size, shape, angles and width and repeated this process several times.  I could have just duplicated the grass clumps and simply rotated them several times without changing the size, shape or width of the duplicated however I would have just ended up as a clump of grass in straight lines and would not have look natural or like realistic grass.  After this I combined all the duplicated together to make them one object.  After this I created eight different variations of grass clumps and exported them to UE4 as fbx files.  I think my grass clumps are looking pretty good so far however I will save judgement until I can see them in UE4 as thats where I need them to look good.  I think I done this process very well, I was always curious as to how video game developers put grass in video games as grass is so small and I thought it would be very complicated and take ages, however it was actually pretty straight forward and the grass clumps make a lot more sense than just using one bit grass over and over again.  There isn't really much that I would do differently to this process, maybe just add a flower or two to one or two of my grass clumps to make my landscape look a little more tropical, but overall I am happy with my outcome and feel I done quite well here!