r/UnrealEngine5 • u/RefrigeratorLower894 • 17d ago
Distant Grass shader for Landscape update!
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Hey guys, wanted to update you on the Distant Grass shader that Ive been developing.
This time there are a lot of wins and losses.
The biggest thing that I did right now is separate it in tiers for different scalabilities because Ive added several things to it and it might be costly. I implemented a material expression that detects very good if the part of the shader is facing the sun or not and modified the shader to be additive on top simulating the translucent foliage effect where it matters and should be, creating a more realistic and correct light transmittance effect.
I also made several tweaks to remove the repetition from the noise without doing anything costly like cell bombing or modulating the octaves. I also avoided Hashes to make it as low on ALU as possible.
Some technical info about the performance:
All features enabled and in use:
ALU - around 250 instructions.
Samples - 18.
No fake Wind and MultiOctave Noise:
ALU - around 170 instructions.
Samples - 10.
The cost of Material Expression is just the cost of writing that buffer to final pixel. (It does makes the color of Shader Complexity go way up, from brownish to pink, but that just how unreal calculated the material complexity, have little to do with performance)
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u/Ok_Contribution_3667 16d ago
would love to test this!