I already know the different ways of making grass in blender but one thing interests me. Using particles takes up far too much space in my project. It almost instantly slows everything down. I struggled with finding a way around this. (Mind you, I’m not just making a scene but an entire level.) I started playing a game to see how they go about it. (Bioshock 3) To my surprise…all they did was make 2-D objects, put a grass image on it, and have it sway back and forth! It just seemed so surprising to me that a game as realistic as bioshock 3 would do that. With all the free space that they have, you would think they would use a particle system and have colored strands or even an object repeated several thousands of times. In the end I did what they did and made a particle system of the grass image. However instead of the particle count being 20,000 it’s only at 3000. I guess in the end, game designers have to worry about space too.
Real grass meshes would bring unreal 3 to its knees. There are some vertex animation tricks that help, but that’s still pricey. Pretty much all last gen (360, ps3) games do grass like you are mentioning.
Pretty much every game EVER does grass that way. The only ones that don’t are those that specialize in foliage (Crysis, Uncharted, Far Cry) and even they they only use other methods for “hero” foliage i.e. that which will be right up on the camera.