Procedural Grass Mats

[jujubee]

Not nearly a fraction as nice as Metro's Grazing sheep but functional - figured I'd post the scene in case anyone wants to play around with it or test their render times. It's made from built-in procedurals (Cellular and Mix) and uses Vray Displacement.



Max 7 scene file is here:

http://www.lunarstudio.com/misc/grass_test.zip (27KB)

Athlon XP 64-bit 3200
2 gigs DDR400 (PC3200)

[siliconbauhaus]

oooh cheers....is it fairly fast?

arrrgh max 7, bugger, could you post the mat and a pic of the settings please mate?

[jujubee]

I'm actually running it in a scene (with a decent amount of lawn) to be posted - it looks good and is relatively fast for me.

Here's some screen captures of the settings:



The first Mix map is in the diffuse of a Vraymtl. You'll have to tweak the colors accordingly to your lighting setup. Adjusting the grass height - 3-4" gives it some realism. Also increasing a plane's subdivisions helps. And you'll also want to increase the tiling of the cellular displacement depending on how much grass needs to fill the scene. I found the max I needed was 75x75.

[Morbid Angel]

it always bugged me how displaced grass always sticks up like little sticks. Too bad vray cant have displacement direction like mr..

[percydaman]

ive found if you use a subtle max displacement using noise or something else on the plane it breaks it up some which can go along way towards getting away from that perfect vertical grass look.

[siliconbauhaus]

cheers jujubee...I'll have a play with that later on

[Morbid Angel]

here is how i think grass should look.

[jujubee]

Wow. That's really impressive How the heck did you manage that and what were the render times like?!?!!?!!?

[Morbid Angel]

juju, its max hair which comes with 7.5 converted to mesh, 35000 hairs...r-time is 13 min with quasi for both bounce

[DaForce]

Ornatrix does a damn fine grass as well

[Morbid Angel]

i d say any hair system will do nicer grass then displ..infact you can use pflow and modeled grass to spread particles across surface and get as nice grass as this ones

[jujubee]

They all look great - but you are all talking about really turning up render times. For scenes with alot of geometry and no closeups- a simple vray displacement should work better. right?

[percydaman]

for arch vis I think it works just fine. Of course for broadcast or film, simple displacement doesn't really have enough control. I mainly do arch vis at the moment, so its good enough for me.

[Dynedain]

They all look great - but you are all talking about really turning up render times. For scenes with alot of geometry and no closeups- a simple vray displacement should work better. right?

From my tests, its just as long because the geometry is still being created

[jujubee]

I wouldn't think it's creating nearly as many polys. What would you all think is the best method for archvis then?