Wind Waker-styled tall grass

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So what I'm trying to do is set up tall grass exactly how it's handled in Wind Waker; if the player walks into it, it gets pushed over, and when the player is no longer near it, it goes back to being upright. The problem is, I have no idea where to start with this. Do I use triggers and adjust the grass's angle accordingly if the player is in the trigger, or what? I can't exactly use non-trigger colliders because then the player wouldn't be able to walk through the grass.

Answer 1

Answer by tanoshimi · May 01, 2017 at 06:21 AM

Triggers/Colliders would work but would be an expensive solution, since you'd be running a physics simulation on each blade of grass.

When I did this on a previous project we modifed the Unity grass shader (called Nature/DoubleSidedWave or something similar) to include a vertex deformation that pushed the top vertices of each grass plane mesh away from the location of the player, which was supplied as a worldspace Vector3 parameter to the shader. Simple and fast because it runs entirely on the GPU, and it looks quite effective especially if you run through densely-planted patches.

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ToeBeanGames · May 01, 2017 at 06:53 AM 1

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I wouldn't necessarily be doing it on every blade of grass. Like I said, it's Wind Waker-styled; rather than rendering every blade of grass I just have a grass patch mesh that I use to populate slightly larger patches. alt text

tanoshimi ToeBeanGames · May 01, 2017 at 07:20 AM 0

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Yes, but even a collider/rigidbody per mesh chunk would be expensive - you really don't need to simulate acceleration, velocity, transfer of momentum or collision contact points do you?

Answer 2

Answer by CorvusGameLab · Apr 10 at 01:34 PM

Hi, i made a grass shader with lots of features like player interaction or placing the grass only on a certain height. If you are interested you can download it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st-EjyeObEM

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Wind Waker-styled tall grass

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