I'm experimenting with a couple different techniques for making vegetation. The grass worked well with having just simple standing planes intersecting one another at sharp angles and it seemed best to keep the alpha thin at ground contact. I'm making each instance pretty large to keep the draw call count down which works great on the flat terrain. The cow parsley is currently also simple planes and it is very cheap but gets skewed at certain angles. I'm playing with the idea of setting the flowers on a plane perpendicular to the stem..
I've been hand-painting most of the vegetation based on reference images, but for the cow parsley I decided to try modeling it and projecting to my planes. I think it was actually faster then hand-painting and gave me lots of subtle lighting nuances for free. Some of that detail gets lots in-game though..
More to come. Maybe a cow.
More to come. Maybe a cow.