Creating grasses for CRENGINE Using Blender

My game development Walkthrough series - Part 3

                  In this tutorial I'm going to talk about creating grasses for Cryengine Eaas. Eaas version uses the physical based shading(PBS) and I have explained how to create those vegetation textures in one of my previous tutorials.
                   This is my grass texture (left side shows the diffuse texture without alpha and the right side shows modified version with alpha).

                    I have included the short and tall grass texture into one texture map to reduce draw calls. So we are going to use one material and one texture for both small and tall grass models.
                   Basically 1 material = 1 draw call. For best performance it is better to have a number of draw calls around 2000. With combined textures I can use 1 material/texture on multiple objects.
                   Open Blender and start with a simple plane. Use knife tool to add extra edges. Unwrap the plane. In here we are using two different planes for short grass.

                   Duplicate those planes several times and make a grass clump. Actually we cannot see the both sides of the clump because we are using default 'Blender Render'  So make sure that you are using 'Blender Game' renderer. Also turn off the 'Backface Culling' and choose 'Alpha Blend' as the blend mode in material settings.

                       We are not going to use proxies or bending for short grass. So join those planes to one object. Create a material with proper material physics(__physNone).

eg - grass01__01__Material__physNone

                        Create a cryexport node. Apply smooth shading and export it. Use suitable material settings in cryengine.

                       This is my grass clumps.

                   In my next post, I will explain how to create touch bendable tall grasses/plants. Thanks.