Dynamic Grass builds an Ecosystem in your Game that is Alive and Reactive
It is crazy to me how much a little thing like the grass moving beneath your feet adds to a game experience. The immersion built is exponential and there are not a whole lot of things that can make a game experience have depth for me than to have subtly reactive elements. Elements that make the world around whatever character I am playing feel alive with its own drives and needs.
This pack is an incredibly easy to chew taste of the complexity that these systems demand. It is essentially built so that you can apply it without having a hugely deep understanding of the underlying work, though having that knowledge will definitely help when optimizing.
Hands down a must have pack for anyone doing outdoor scenes and games. If you have your character running through grass you should at least have a look inside this pack to see what you can learn from it.
The hierarchy is actually relatively simple for what the pack has to offer. While not primarily a material or mesh pack, mainly a Blueprint and “function” pack it is pretty easy to sift through and explore. A+ on that note.
This one is intense on first load, huge signs load in first and than the shaders slowly pop into life ending with the dynamic wind effect suddenly taking hold.
The signs and notation help though. The effect whenever you turn off the infrastructure sold me on the pack immediately, though a distinctly emotional effect it ended up panning out as I dug into the pack.
There are a lot of awesome little example scenarios built into the game, just to showcase a few here. There was a UFO one that really grabbed my eye, basically it lands and creates a crop circle. Built into the UX are some activated objects like grenades and thrown items that showcase their effects on the grass. Really cool stuff.
The dynamic nature of the foliage in this pack is really fun to play around with and as with a few packs before it, I judge this pack as an absolute win just based on the sheer inspiration for different scenes and games I could build out with it.
Running through the fields of wheat alone gave me some weird amount of joy though I can safely say that I did not give in fully to my sense of childlike wonder and there were no genitalia drawn in the wheat this day.
The meshes and materials are broad in this pack, though not the focal point in any way. A lot of things are tied into blueprints that are tied further into other blueprints. This makes untangling the web of effects somewhat of a chore but as long as you reassemble things in the proper order or tie them together in a way that does not break the logic, you build your own art and effects into this foundation.
Materials are mostly utilized as instances, with special additions such as the wind normals and wind parameters added.
All the textures are at 1k so overall the optimization is high. The effects for the wind and the grass movement did not cause my computer any stress though it is brand new so that is not quite indicative of the average dev.
This pack is REALLY cool and I have barely scratched the surface of it. There are a ton of systems that I still need to explore and pick apart, for the most part it is a stand-alone useful pack. However the real strength to this pack is the foundation it creates for your OWN art and environments, you can easily build your own materials into this framework and develop unique biomes and scenes.
Here is some other content by this developer!
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