curl-6 said:
To me it looks like they are still 2D sprites, but now placed at varying angles rather than always facing the camera as in XCX. |
...That's not a sprite. A srite used in this way is called a Billboard. It's a sprite in the sense it is 2D and always faces the camera, but is fixed to a specific spot in a 3D space. It's not a plane, which is just a flat, 2D mesh.
The grass is made of planes, 2D meshes that bisect each other. Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV, Witcher 3, Farcry 3, 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, V, and on and on use this exact method. The only modern open world games that I know of that DON'T use this are Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X (which use billboards) and Breath of the Wild (which uses meshes of some kind for every single blade of grass).
