Just wondering if anyone has found a way to get grass that looks like a well-kept lawn, rather than shaggy grass which is what I always get, no matter what texture I use and with the grass height and height variation set to 0%:
I can’t use that in a render to illustrate a garden design to a client. I find using the ‘Carpet’ material type helps a bit, but it still looks pretty messy:
Is there any way to make it look like someone has mown it (stripes not needed!)?
thanks
I did this as a test back in 2018: Fun with the preview version and grass height
The grass looks short simply because there is ‘long’ stuff next to it. The stripes are simply 2 grass materials with one lighter than the other.
Stripes look good, and I can see that method working well for getting the stripes to show in the render (I normally add in photoshop if needed). But even the ‘cut’ grass is way too shaggy. A decent mown lawn is more like this length/evenness:
I’ll just stick with a 2D texture until something better becomes available.
From a distance, like in the photo you just posted, there are no ‘blades’, it’s just a smooth carpet of grass. How about this:
Use the attached noise map as a displacement with a value of 0.5 and lock its dims to 1m x 1m … adust to suit when you’re viewing it in the render.
It won’t survive closeup viewing but for a ‘carpet’ of grass like your photo, it should be fine.
Funnily enough I had an end user with a similar question not long ago - this is how we worked around it.
rather than
and we replaced the grass.png file with the cut option
These are in
%localappdata%\Programs\Enscape\Renderer\SystemData\Textures\Enscape\Common
Now the reason this is useful is that the carpet and grass shaders both have different placement patterns, - so we can overlap 2 faces with the material on each and it effectively doubles the density of grass.
1 face with “grass” and another with “carpet” which now looks identical to grass.
Zoom up close and you’ll see the cut edges
Zoom out and your grass will look slightly more uniform and will be denser than before
Even if you don’t want to trim the grass, replacing carpet with grass is a handy trick to give you less patchy grass.
(or less patchy carpet too I suppose!)
Thank you thank you! My renderings are all on a golf course & the grass is too irregular to be accurate on a nicely manicured golf course. I was wondering if I could just crop the top off of the grass.png file to solve the problem and you answered that question. Thank you.
It might take a few tries, I found I needed a degree of irregularity still to keep it looking natural, which is why I left a few blades a little longer than others,
Swapping out the carpet for grass will definitely help lots too - but just be warned that you will take a bit of a performance hit things become denser.
