New Moss Clump Approach

I decided to take a different approach to creating moss clumps. I had been aiming to make the texture of the mosses feel like you can touch them, like when you look at moss in a photo or in real life it looks soft, velvety, and alive, with its dense, fuzzy surface and moist, earthy appearance inviting you to reach out and run your fingers through its lush, spongy layers. I also wanted to use LOD switching in Unity.

Here is the alpha I created to paint onto my sculpt in Blender.

I created two sets of textures in Substance Painter. One set is set up for Blender's Shader nodes and the other is set up for Unity's materials. Here is a render from Blender of LOD0 with the textures.

I made a script that switches between LOD depending on the distance of the camera from the moss the clump. I shortened the distance so you can see it change faster for the sake of this short video.

In Blender I sculpted some large clump shapes, increased the density of the mesh with Quad Remesher, and then used my alpha map by drawing the fine details on the surface. From there I made 3 low poly models for LOD switching in Unity: LOD0, LOD1, and LOD2.

In Unity, I wanted to have a side by side comparison of LOD0, LOD1, and LOD2. So on the left: LOD0 is 4k tris. In the middle, LOD1 is 2k tris, and on the right LOD2 is 685 tris. I think LOD0 and LOD1 look very similar, and LOD2 looks pretty good for being very low poly and you will only see that from far away.

Here is the moss clump switching LODs in Unity’s scene.