Looking back on this part of the project: 

This entire progress of grass creation has been a long one with me initially starting this over two weeks ago. The reasoning for this taking so long to complete is down to my first iterations of the grass weren't what I wanted so I scrapped the first implementation of this just before the Easter holidays. Other things as well such as the fact I didn't work on the project over the Easter holidays but that two weeks did let me soak in a better approach to this entire idea and let me think through better and generally less troublesome approach when I intend this to be an easy setup package. Not much changed overall as I simplified a few areas and change slight thing in areas such as textures to get a better and more accurate Ghibli look. 

What have i implemented?

- Grass (obviously) (This has two LODs one modeled version and a plane version)

- Flowers (two LODs per flower and different variations)

- RVTs (This was nearly removed but it was the best option for getting the result I wanted)

- Pre-made grass texture

What exactly changed:

- I didn't make anything optimized until two days ago so I had awfully un-optimized grass that was using 2k texture sizes which you can imagine the pain my PC was in, running 1000 small moving planes that have a 2k texture plastered on it. But after 2 days at college fixing this major mess I had made with performance after fixing a couple texture sizes the fps increase on the PC specs of an i7-4700 (don't quote me on that I know its a i7 and in the 4000 series) and a 1080 GPU i gained an increase from 90 fps to 120 fps cap on epic settings in UE4's editor. The texture size on the grass was decreased down to a 512x512 px size from its original 2048x2048 px size and i finally got around to creating a LOD for this which is just a flat plane with a rendered image of the grass and using a 256x256 px opacity map. Then on top of that I added a distance culling, which is quite high as of right now but I'm just using this as a preview and I'm not creating a game from this but this culling distance can be turned down in two clicks so its of easy access to anyone. To add onto the visual side of this I initially had quite rounded grass blades which I didn't think were going to be a problem but after creating sharper blades for the grass then I saw difference which was massive and the sharper grass blades fit more with the Ghibli style.

2048x2048 also rounded edges

512x512 sharper edges

- As for the flowers I hadn't started anything for these until two days ago and only really had a quick idea to make these work. The flowers similarly to the grass have a 512x512 px size but aren't opacity maps as these don't read the ground texture and use RVTs so the flowers and steam were painted within Krita using watercolors as this is the closest i can get to the nicker poster colours that Studio Ghibli use. Something else from the process of creation for the flowers is the use of modeling style. What i mean by this is i have used a transparent/PNG texture so that i can use less triangles and still have crisper looking to the flowers and grass. What i mean by this is i can use minimal polygons to create a high quality model but i have to use textures instead. So instead of modeling grass like below, I use a PNG texture and UV the grass blade onto a lower poly model. This applies the same for the flowers where I use the transparency of the PNG to keep the higher quality look. This is also way more performant than using an unreasonable amount of extras polygons to create something that slightly achieves the same quality but costs a lot to the GPU in performance.

- The wind animation for the grass i wont be implementing working on further than whats currently there as i've had issues with it but its not my main intention or problem and was some quality of life addition to get a better preview of the grass and flowers. So it will stay but not get improved as its not priority or something i initially planned.