this is another approach to grass. It’s pretty descent I think apart from the blades clipping through the stones. It’s 100.000 particles.
Btw, does anyone know if or how it’s possible to do grass with a curve guide in 2.46? Seems like it’s totally freaking out if I try it the old way with a Bezier-Curve.
And another question about that clipping issue: How can I avoid clipping? Making the rocks deflectors for the particles didn’t work. At least I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe I’m not doing it right.
I think the new method is to use parents particles and children particles. You press the set editable button and you can then edit the parents which in turn affects the children. Looks nice by the way.
Sachiel, is there a specific tutorial or something you used? I’m using 2.46 RC1 as well and am having trouble with tutorials since they are taylored to previous layouts of the particle system. I would love to make grass like yours for a forest scene I’m working on - is there any advice you can give about lighting, particle settings, etc.?
After some playing around, I still don’t know what a vast majority of the particle settings do, but here is something I came up with for grass.
Up close it looks really bad because I don’t know how to give it thickness/volume - I think you need children for that, which I tried and failed to figure out.
You can give them volume by using the “Strands” button under the Materials Button. It’s located under “Links and Pipeline”. There you can find the button for the new Surface Diffuse and the Distance slider.
Here’s a pic:
Then you should apply a grass texture to your plane. I used one from [www.cgtextures.com].
About the particle settings I used,here’s another pic:
I’d give you the blend file but it’s about 60 megs. Dunno really why.
I made another plane below the actual plane for the bigger grass plants. I gave it a more yellowish coloured texture (not shown on the pic):
Though there should be an easier way. I just didn’t know how to apply two particle systems which use a different material each.
Then, thanks to the advice of you guys above I fiddled around with the new particle mode. You can use it once you are done with the particle settings. You just push the “set editable” button under the particle system slider, change to particle mode and you can like comb your particles or delete them and the likes. I used it to finally get rid of that clipping issues.
I forgot to mention that I used a cloud texture on my initial plane to make it more bumpy with the “noise” button, so the grass looks a bit more diverse in terms of length and direction without having to increase more randomness to the particles.
Hope that helps. It’s a test and unfortunately I didn’t do it to fit a large scene. Using these settings on bigger scenes should be somewhat computing intensive. Plus, I still haven’t found out how to achieve comparable results with using children.
Anyway, feel free to ask, if you need to. Or if anybody has got any advice to do it more efficient let’s hear it.
The new particle system allows you to add multiple systems to a mesh – you just drag on the name combo in the Particle System box (on the particle buttons) and select “ADD NEW”. You can set materials, density, everything individually on them - the material must be linked by the object (or mesh, which implicitly links it for the object), though.
I’m working on grass in 2.46 RC1 too and my file is 32MB.
Thanks Sachiel, I never would have discovered the STRANDS if you didn’t show them to me.
I forgot to mention that I used a cloud texture on my initial plane to make it more bumpy with the “noise” button, so the grass looks a bit more diverse in terms of length and direction without having to increase more randomness to the particles.
What do you mean by this? The “noise” button on a cloud texture? How does this make the grass more diverse in length and direction?
I tried to write a tut but it turned out to be utter crap. So, here’s the blend file. I’ve got a more recent version on my PC where there is only one plane with two materials and two particle systems but I hope this is sufficient for the time being. I’ve still to look up what textures I did exactly use. The links are gonna follow.
Thanks sachiel, I like the new rocks - they might be the best I’ve ever seen. The grass is of course awesome as well - the stuff I made based on what I learned from your earlier posts has brownian motion applied. You might want to try out the brownian motion if you haven’t - a setting of just 0.1 usually make the grass less straight and more “wiggly.”
To prevent grass from crossing the rocks you could place empties with spherical fields with boundaries. It would repel the grass even in an animation (if you add wind, for example) whereas combing only works on one frame.
Thanks for the help. I forgot that it has to be an empty top work properly.
About the File I put online - I think I zipped the wrong version of it. So here’s the Easter Edition of Grasstest. And it’s below 8 MB. Due to the mass of particles, it might be a bit slow on, well, slower PCs. The bloom node is now in it. Though it’s more like a pr0n-soft-focus-node. Nah, here goes:
Nice and convincing lighting.
