Best way to animate grass mesh on a none terrain.

Unity Engine
1

I’m having trouble coming up with the best way to animate my grass on a custom mesh.

I’m using Geo painter from asset store to spray my grass prefab over a custom mesh (none terrain) all it does is create a game object with lots of prefabs (my grass) attached to it.

First I tried using the perlin noise CrumpleMesh script on my prefab, which worked ok apart from being really heavy on CPU with each grass mesh having the script attached, also the base of the grass moved with the top which limited the amount of movement I could use without it looking weird.

Second I tried to wrestle the tree creator into creating a similar mesh (typical crossed up poly) with a wind zone which pretty much works apart from the shader is not the shader I would like to use, the leaves shader looks nasty and no amount of texture or shader tweaking has made it acceptable visually, all I really need is a simple transparent shader for my grass.

Does anyone have advice on how to create this seemingly simple effect?

Thanks in advance

kinl

2

well one way could just be using a plane with a grass texture that is animated using a sprite sheet.
another one could be the strands animated and baked down withouth bones. now using maya i’m able to do that but unity doesn’t reconize it so normally you would have to use bones. so the first option would be probably the better option.
now another one could maybe be the particle effects, just not shure really lol like if you are able to get it to look like grass then you are on luck.

3

Thanks Foxter, I did think of an animated sprite sheet, but figured it was extra texture memory I didn’t need to have, I guess if the CPU cost of waving a few points about outweighs that of a extra texture then it’d be a good option, I I think the smoothness would be an issue too.