Looking for some ideas for growing grass (no not that sort :p)

[fixeighted]

I have a thing....

A large single letter..can be any letter, extruded. This letter is 20m tall.
It needs to be eventually completely covered in geometric grass/clover/whatever, at a reasonably correct scale.
It needs to grow from various points in as natural a way as is possible.
It needs to be able to be seen very close up in slowish tracking shots, with the camera following in the path of its growth towards us.
It needs to be somewhat transferrable to Vantage if possible, so that the cameraman can work up shots, though I can work around that
possible limitation.

So far I keep getting halted by one or more things with each method I try (some from lack of knowledge I'm sure).

VrayFur looked possible, controlled by a ramp/noise, but sadly we can now not use regular materials and the hair shader looks crap when close up. Not Vantage friendly.

ForestPack was a thought, though initially I can't see a way to control the growth and the spread easily, although not spent too much time on that one.

Tyflow (basic version) was my first choice and seems to offer what I need, but I can't seem to force it to do exactly what I want, so any pointers I'd be grateful for please.
I have 64gb ram so that is a fixed limitation but in any case, getting it to be completely covered at the end of a frame range of e.g. 300
and having the correct scaling is proving tricky to achieve. The items (single blades look best) need to be effectively zero scale, invisible and slowly grow over say 2 secs.
I can provide the scene as I have it atm if anyone can help out

Any other ideas also welcome.

[Vizioen]

I can't really help you with TyFlow as I have no experience but I also suggest asking on the Facebook group, they are very helpful there.

[fixeighted]

Thanks...that's certainly a ggod idea and something I can do, but will also hope someone has some extra possibilities just in case that proves fruitless. It'd be good to explore options as
my cameraman is quite a painfully picky mofo

[Joelaff]

You saw some of the growth tuts on YouTube:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=anQEXPlC31c

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=npUzJ03zyzQ

It will definitely take some tweaking. Perhaps you could use some vrmeshes to cut down on memory if you need to.

Maybe there is a method with some LOD control as well. Or maybe you render at different subdivision levels with a few frames overlap to create your own LOD.

VRayFur does do LOD. I thought you could assign a normal material to it ( not just hair). No? That’s weird. Maybe the max geometry hair and fur?

I think Tyflow would be my first choice though. It will instance if you set it to render as instances, not geometry.

Sounds like a fun, but potentially frustrating, project!

[fixeighted]

Yeah the grow neighbours is the general technique I'm using but the combination of factors in my setup is giving me
headaches. Maybe I'm just tired and will figure it out but currently it's taken up a load of time to only get partially what I need.

I always end up with curve-ball projects. The collaborator on this this one for instance has just asked if I am ok to stick with the
price I quoted for this (with almost zero storyboard) whilst being ok with the duration of the piece doubling in length and also allowing for any changes the client wants to make.
So yeah...frustrating but also a load of fu.

VrayFur used to have the flat normals option but it was taken away for reasons I forget, meaning that only the hair shader works. Anything else turns it back to cylinders

[fixeighted]

I sort of have a working Tyflow version which fully coats the mesh with grass (flowers and such I'll do as separate flows),
although I'm needing to use 500k particles (using just 2 very low res meshes) which is killing my 64gb ram.

The instance rendering doesn't appear to work in the free version, so maybe it's a limitation, but before I pay for a pro seat
I'm curious to know whether 128gb would be sufficient, if anyone has experience that's similar to these particle counts.

[Joelaff]

Try exporting as a tycache and then setting the cache to use instances.

Hard to say how much memory would be needed as there are a lot of other variables. Try the usual tricks of vrmeshes where possible and convert all textures to tiled, etc.

I’d be happy to try rendering something to see how much memory it uses, but I am on max 2021 (latest Tyflow pro).

[fixeighted]

Ah ok, thanks, I'll try that.
I also have another plan; to force them to storyboard it properly (wow, what a novel thought ), which would mean
I can have focused flows in specific areas, so the count would be reduced enormously.
Fully viewed wider shots can be done with larger clumps/fewer instances but with the same look.

Thanks for the offer of a test....I may well post something if I can't either make it work to my satisfaction with my current config, or otherwise buy more ram
and full software to make it happen...it's a big chunk of my costs so would rather not.