Grass blowing in wind?

[biglolly]

Hi All,

Generally when I do grass in vray I just use a displacement, but a friend who uses cinema 4D has a very nice solution - can't remember if it was plugin based or if it was using the grass/fur. Actually no it was the hair module for cinema.

Does 3DS Max do this? I have just received the latest version, 9 - wondering if it will allow me to do nice grass blowing in the wind, not static displacement grass.

Thanks!

[Clifton Santiago]

You could use Vray fur

[jonnybefree]

or shave & haircut.(included in max)

[biglolly]

Cheers dudes.

Can the fur/hair/grass be affected by dynamics in max like wind, gravity and such?

[MegaPixel]

Yes it can. There are some tutorials that come with MAX I beleive that touch on this. However, I can't get the Max hair to work in conjunction with Vray without some kind of crash or problem, atleast when using 1.47.xx on max 8.

[Da_elf]

the coolest plugin i used to use back in the max3 or 4 days was grass-o-matic which came free with a demo of their tree plugin. it has animation peramiters built in

[SnipeyX]

I used the built-in max hair a good bit, more with mental ray than vray, though i can't say ive run into any issues the few times I have used it with vray. it has lots of possibilities for animation and styling that I've been pretty impressed with. Definitely checkout some of the basic hair tutorials & other documentation that comes with max, they should get you pretty close to where you want to be.

[jacksc02]

da_elf I love grass o matic! it was made by Druid and was the best grass plugin around. I used ot keep max 5 onstalled just so I could render grass passes in it. I tried to get in contact with the developer of the plugin but I had no success

[biglolly]

Hi all,

Have recently installed Max 9 at work, and have done a little experimenting with the hair/fur/grass built in, though with limited success.

It works fine when I don't have any vray lights in a scene - as soon as I add any lights in the scene the grass becomes really dark, so to compensate I up the brightness, but that in turn then means the rest of my scene is much too bright.

Anyone else experimented with max 9 hair and vray?

[Sawyer]

Havent had the darkeneing problem. By using the geometry feature I have been able to create animated grass. The problem I have is that I then don't have a material I have to use the base material on the plane.

[biglolly]

Hi there,

Tried using the geometry feature also, but it's mind numbingly slow! Must be a way of using vray and max grass and get it to illuminate properly...

[Sawyer]

I have found if you turn it to mesh it works fine. As long as its not animated.

[DaForce]

If you use shadowmapped lights instead of vray shadows it should work.

But basically the only way is to use geometry mode. Other wise vray basically cant see the grass properly. Its like that with all atmospheric grass/hair/fur plugins.

[Sawyer]

Right now I am trying this:

Copy base object and hide faces and apply material to that. Then remove the hair/fur from the ground/base object. Now I have 2 objects 2 materials and animation. Seems to work.

[unknown]

heres what i did with shave and haircut rendered scanline with standard lights, comped with vray renders for other geometry. animation is a bit fiddly, as it tends to react like hair, rather than grass, but its achievable.