Hello!
Today, I’d like to briefly share how we improved the movement of grass.
Initial Version
This is the grass that existed in the early stages of development.
When we placed it in the game, the static appearance looked dull, so we tried adding a wind-swaying effect.
To achieve this, we pre-baked tilted versions of the grass generated via code.
While the added movement was nice, the auto-generated visuals weren’t particularly appealing.
Hand-drawing everything was too much work, and it didn’t seem like it would be much better anyway.
Also, having to re-bake the textures every time we modified an image was a hassle.
Still, since we couldn’t come up with a better solution, and it looked much better than static images, we just stuck with it.
New Method
We happened to see a scene from the game Eastward.
There was grass swaying in the wind, and even though it was rendered using mesh bending, it didn’t feel out of place at all.
Seeing this helped us break free from the idea that pixel art had to match perfectly at the pixel level.
Here’s an example we made using a mesh-based approach.
It was implemented by passing a curve value to a vertex shader, which then calculated the position.
Despite being pixel art, the mesh bending felt surprisingly natural.
Final Result
This method allowed for much more detailed expression than the baking method, resulting in much more responsive visuals.
This is another scene.
We no longer had to bake textures each time the image changed, and the visual quality was vastly improved — very satisfying.
Thanks for reading!
