Another attempt to make grass

[Atomike]

Every year, I have to update a commercial for a golf tournament. I couldn't find my project from last year so I started from scratch. I spent most of my time on the grass/hair. Crits are welcome.

[Roger]

Every year, I have to update a commercial for a golf tournament. I couldn't find my project from last year so I started from scratch. I spent most of my time on the grass/hair. Crits are welcome.

 

Grass looks good but a touch sparse. I found that when I was experimenting with it I had to bump the density to like 500% before it looked the way I wanted it to look.

[martin]

Making grass with Hair has some serious drawbacks. How much grass are we talking about? 1,000,000... 10,000,000... blades? Calculations and rendering on those kinds of numbers don't come cheap. You'd have 99% of your computer's horsepower doing something that probably only has secondary interest in your scene.

 

For grass, lower the density (a lot!), and try to use a grass image that is wider (to fill in the "spareness" resulting from lowering the density). The grass image should have multiple blades of grass; a clump of grass.

 

Also, grass isn't like someone's front lawn in the suburbs. Have a couple (3 maybe?) Hair systems of varying grass types: i.e. dandelions, short grass, tall grass, (and keep their densities down!)

[R Reynolds]

For grass, lower the density...

For instance in the attached grass test image, the grey scale image on the left is the density map, you only need higher densities near the camera and can drop of quickly and still look believable. The other grey scale image is the grass length map. The underlying ground patch has a Darktree material called meadows.dsts that I found on the Net. There is no grass growing beyond the farthest picnic table just a simple noise\bump material to try to suggest distant grass.

[the_black_mage]

actualy there is a tutoral for grass with hair. hold on let me find it.

 

EDIT: here it is.

 

http://perso.orange.fr/ffave/e_herbes.htm

 

EDIT: also you have have to use the old hair system for this one. i think you can use it by holding ctrl then click the hair system.

[Atomike]

Yeah, I used that method (and tutorial) about 2 years ago. Results were less than stellar. I think the new hair is way better. I'd love to see a new tutorial using modern tools - and perhaps a variety of methods (such as Martin's 3 material grass mentioned above).

[martin]

Yeah, I used that method (and tutorial) about 2 years ago. Results were less than stellar. I think the new hair is way better. I'd love to see a new tutorial using modern tools - and perhaps a variety of methods (such as Martin's 3 material grass mentioned above).

Mike, it sounds to me like you just volunteered to write a new "Grass" tutorial when you figure this thing out.