Good day, I’m really new in unity and I’m trying to make a farming game in which you can plant wheat. Its 3D and it the view is like in a strategy game. It can rotate around the Y axis only.
The game art style is low poly hand painted and I’d like to keep the vertex count to the minimum.
I was inspired somewhat by Civ6 wheat patches

The idea is that each straw sticks up and (ideally) cast a shadow
I’m curious about how to approach this issue, there is some ideas I was thinking:
Draw wheat straws into a plane with alfa channel.
Make a simple 3d model and then hand paint it
The issue is that if even if I make a low poly model (like 10 vertices) when I stack them together the vertex count climbs up really fast.
How could I tackle that issue?
Will it affect performance significantly?
Thank you!
You can use shader to generate grass patches.
You can generate grass with shaders.
Personally I’d try to use alpha-cutout grass planes (i.e. billboard grass) and see if this is enough. Those would be able to cast shadows, though it might not look great.
You could make assumptions, you could ask others to make assumptions for you, or in 30 minutes you can build a test and find out for yourself exactly what impact it will be.
Its a good idea to start with the simplest solution, test it, and only go more complicated if test fail or maybe some workflow/pipeline reasons motivate a need to do things differently.
In other words, make the basic alpha cards like 99% of other games use and is easy to do. Test it. Notice a problem? If not, roll on to the next problem.
The easiest way to handle this is to just not allow camera rotation.
Check out Age of Wonders 3 or Age of Planetfall.
Both did a beautiful job with less hassle because they just prevented rotation. In a civ style game rotating the camera is generally kinda pointless anyway. It tends to just be disorienting.
Either way, i’d just do grass planes. But make your life easier and just drop camera rotation.
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I agree.
Game still can be 3D, but allows to use static images, no need for complex lights, cameras, or shaders.
For single dev, that helps tons.
OP still can keep zoom in and out.
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I’ve found that dropshadows can work really well in 2D Sprites if you use Photoshop. In Phtotoshop, draw your wheat, then add a multiplied shadow underneath with no background layer. When imported into Unity, check the ‘Remove PSD Matte’ and the shadows look great! At least in UI, haven’t tried it in the game space, but seems worth a shot.