I am trying to get rid of white highlights on my grass. I followed a tutorial to create them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q0c2zzdNKA) , but I didn’t get the results I had wanted. The biggest issue are the white blotches all over the grass. I tried a lot of things to get rid of them, but nothing worked. I suppose I could get rid of them in Gimp, but I’d like to know what I did wrong to get the white blotches in the first place and how to get rid of them in Blender.
The white is coming from the gloss on the grass material and a very strong sun and sky. Take your first grass blade, ‘GRASS 3’ go into the nodes and make it pure diffuse green, no image texture, a basic dark green diffuse. 1 node. Name this material ‘simple grass’ No select your next grass blade ‘grass 1’ and to the left of the material name click the little material chooser (looks like a sphere) and choose ‘simple grass’ do this for all the blades until they are all simple grasss. Knock the particle number down to under 10,000.
Select each blade of grass and add a default solidify modifier. Render.
Ok, the sun. Cycles doesn’t do great with lamps, strongly consider using a plane (or sphere) and adding an emission material (Strength 2-10) instead. Knock the sky envorioment down to 1-2
At the least knock the strength of the sun down to 1, and increase it’s size some. It’s an odd angle for the sun, as the sky indicates it’s mid-day and sun is coming in at a steep angle like it’s setting.
Experiment with the lighting some (try mesh lights) and then go back into the 'simple grass and add some gloss, and some translucency, and put your image textures back in)
Thanks for responding. I tried to follow your directions. The lighting is much better. I was only able to use one grass blade texture because they all change to the same texture. Also, the grass looks very thin. I tried to change the color of the ground to green, but that didn’t look too good. I also tried to increase the thickness of the solidify to .05. I don’t know if that did anything. I tried to increase the emission number in the particle system to 25,000. But that didn’t improve it much.
First. excellent job naming your objects in the outliner. Gold star!
If you want blade1 to have a separate material, in the material tab, next to the material name there will be a ‘4’, that means there are 4 objects all sharing this one material. If you click that 4, it will be made ‘single user’ or only that object will have that material and the material name will have .001 appended to it and you can change the nodes without affecting the others.
You could increase the thickness on the solidify modifier, although it’s about correct. You just need some children particles. In the hair system, toward the bottom there’s a section called children. Enable interpolated, 10 children is about right for this scene. So change render to 10 (not 100!) You have the system completely disabled from viewport, which is fine, so it really doesn’t matter much what you set that to.
The scene looks pretty good. I took the sun plane, scaled it 1.5, moved it right a little and angled it down maybe 30 degrees. Both hair systems on the dog, in the children, I added .05 random to kink the hairs a little.
The kinking of the hairs seemed to smooth out the clumps on the puppy’s face. I couldn’t figure out how to do that, and it wasn’t explained in the tutorial. Adding .05 to the random in children fixed that. I posted my final image (http://fav.me/d7y9x5e). I credited you. There are several more questions I could ask about this project, but it’s time to move on. Thanks again for your help.
