3D Grass

I’ve always liked the grass conversion from Castaway Stories I found ages ago, but there are several issues with it, which eventually made me want to create an alternative version of it. This grass is a brand new mesh, but it was strongly based on the CS grass and uses its textures (after all I wanted an alternative version that is very similar but better). The bottom part is a mesh part of Maxis base game flowers, the vertical part is made from scratch using planes. Like I mentioned, the texture is from CS, but not unmodified – I edited it so it fits the UV maps I made, blended the bottom part with different textures (Maxis and my terrain paints), and drew a more ‘grassy’ edge.

The grass comes in 9 colours (the original one and 8 recolours that fit my set of terrain paints, which can be found HERE), and in 3 versions – a normal one, a bit larger one, and a hill-friendly version that looks good and doesn’t float on uneven terrain.
The larger version is just resized (so the grass is taller and covers a bigger area), and due to that it has exactly the same UV map as the normal version. That was a good reason to create a master-slave relation, so the larger one is slaved to the normal one, and it needs the smaller version to work properly.
The hill-friendly version has its own UV map and textures; you need quite a steep hill to make it start floating as most of the mesh is lower than the ground level in the game. I don’t think that hills as steep as the one I showed in the comparison picture are used often in the game, so the grass will look fine on most of the fancily sculpted lots you have.

If you’re wondering what is wrong with the original conversion and why I claim that my grass is better, well, here are the reasons:

• Mine is recolourable and comes in 9 colours, the original one isn’t and has only one colour version.
• I made 3 versions of mine that will fit every lot, not only flat ones.
• The original one was apparently cloned from flowers, but the flower functions don’t work with it properly, so sims keep wanting to interact with it but can’t, so they reset, which is annoying. Mine is cloned from a curtain, which is an unviewable decoration, and I added a Go Here interaction so sims can still walk into an area completely covered by grass. As a decoration with that interaction only it doesn’t cause any issues, isn’t affected by weather or anything, and doesn’t need watering, trimming or any other actions to keep it fine. I edited the curtain BHAVs that the grass uses so it doesn’t need the wall behind it like a curtain would, and can be placed under other objects without the moveObjects on cheat. It only affects the grass itself of course, not all curtains in the game.
• Mine looks better in snow (I know it’s not perfect, but I can’t do anything about it; I tried to change normals, but then it didn’t look as good uncovered as it does now).
• My version is also thicker, which makes it look more natural.
• The original conversion can’t be included with lots because of EA’s policy, mine can.

I tested it and everything seems to work as intended, but let me know if there are any issues with it. The name and catalogue description are in English and Polish, the Go Here interaction is borrowed from Maxis flowers, so it’s displayed properly in all languages. All versions cost §4, and can be found in the flowers category.
The original conversion is in the pictures for the comparison purposes only, and isn’t included in the files.

Polygon Counts:
The normal and large version:
Faces: 204
Vertices: 201

The hill-friendly version:
Faces: 164
Vertices: 164

Additional Credits:
Nopke – for general help with making everything work properly.