Making Toon Grass Look Good
Many years ago (~2010), I wrote a blog post about “Salmon Cohesion Factor” — a term I made up to describe what I would later find out was actually compositing. In VFX terms, compositing is when you make something blend in and feel like a real part of a digital image.
Fast-forward to today, and I still think about SCF and how it applies to making assets for games.
I’ve been working on foliage for Wildwood, and trying to find a style that matches my vision for the game, and also blends nicely into the world. I LOVE me some dense, colorful grasses… but it can’t be too visually noisy.
Here’s my wishlist for foliage:
- Blends nicely / isn’t too noisy
- Is colorful and charming
- Multiple sizes, looks organic
- Works with real-time lights
- Can be layered and dense when needed
And I think I’m finally landing on something that works… and honestly, just makes me happy to look at!
Click to zoom on these before/after screenshots.
Foliage v3 (2024)
Foliage v4 (2025)
For Foliage v3, I was originally manually placing billboard-based grass clumps and even worked on a custom shader to make the bottoms fade out and add a very rough wind effect. I plopped them on these little “islands” of grass (another manually created mesh) to sell the effect of clumped foliage. After all that, it just kind looked like sand and puddles with some sparse looking sticks. Not great.
Then I spent a long time (maybe too much time) deconstructing some of my favorite games to figure out how their grass/foliage worked.
For Foliage v4, I started from scratch and drew my own textures (both on the ground, and for the grass clumps). I decided to use the Terrain system in Unity to manage everything. Doing so also gave me a much nicer color variant system and better wind shader effect. The result is so, so good and really gives the world a richer feeling without being too distracting to the gameplay.
I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak things, but right now the grass is the best it’s ever looked and I’m super pleased with it.
