Dears,
Interesting topic. Let me just add the link to the video. Will make it easier to understand the scope, I believe.
It’s funny how the ‘grass’ topic is kind of redundant in this forum. I believe at some point, there are some keywords, like ‘displacement’ or ‘vray’.
Let me also just add another link from the forum.
The video is kind of interesting, I believe.
Now, I’m not a real dev, so don’t count on me to give you the algorythm or the final logic/&method, however… as a creative, there’s a number of things that are clear to me. 1) Applying a texture, even with bump or parallax/parallax occlusion on a terrain will never create the vertical displacement when viewed from the camera (real time camera). 2) At some point, the old school method was to add sprites… next moved to either decals or instances. Or we can now create a geometry using a variety of methods (from vertices or from materials like the fur mat). And then, we have the shaders and the node mats which (at least up to some point) can help do the trick. Up to some point? Either I’m missing something or it is so that we still need to use a ‘mix’ of techniques? Do we?
I suppose it would be great to have @PatrickRyan input at this point. If you have a minute for this? I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing where you’d like to impress us with your expertise, isnt’it? In any case, I would be eager to read about your analyse of the current state of this in BJS… if you can save a moment to enlight us?
Oh, yeah. If you’d implement it just like that on a large terrain and for low grass, without clipping and lod and some other fancy stuff, it would likely put your GPU to the knees Reason why I’d really love to read about our expert/guru @PatrickRyan input on this. And then. ‘imagine’ we could obtain even just the base of (a shader/an NME/a whatever suitable method)… now, how awesome would that be?
Sidenote: Anyone noticed I’m trying to trigger something here? Just don’t tell anyone, may be it will do the trick
while walking the dog i came up with a very simple idea: since the shadows depend on the normals of the plane, you would actually have to turn the normal vectors in places so that they form a shadow. this assumes that you have a plane with many segments to get better details. no extra material shader is necessary for this idea.
Reason why I’d really love to read about our expert/guru 
Just don’t tell anyone, may be it will do the trick 
