Hey guys, I’ve been having some trouble generating nice looking grass. I am working on an animated short, and I have a very large hilly plane as a ground mesh. I have tried just generating static vectored particles with grass texture, and that would be acceptable but for a few problems.
I did a couple tests, and even with 300,000 particles generated, it still looks very patchy.
I have characters that are very low to the ground with particle generated hair controlled by force feilds. So it would deform the grass particles if the force feild got close enough. I can work around this, but I would rather not limit the animation. If there was a way to somehow “apply” the force feild’s deformation of the hair particles that would work perfectly.
Any help/Ideas would be awesome. Thanks!
The newest SVN builds will allow you to work with millions of grass and fur strands with low memory usage and render times, also has particle dynamics, grab one at graphicall.
To keep render times accetable you have to work with a texture for sections that are not in direct focus.
I’m afraid I have to shout here: DON’T USE ANY OF THE NEW SVN-BUILDS FOR SERIOUS WORK, BECAUSE THEY WILL VERY LIKELY CORRUPT YOUR FILE AND YOU WAN’T BE ABLE TO OPEN IT LATER WITH ANOTHER VERSION.
Though of course the new particle system would be the solution for your problem.
Force fields are limited to their layer. So use a common layer for the forcefield object and the hair.
That don’t answer the questions dudes - I 'm on a similar project and having the same problems. Can it be fixed in blender?? And I’ve subdivided the plane too and still nowt
I don’t think the latest builds are “very likely to corrupt your file”. It is a good idea to not use them for critical projects, though, because things change so quickly that your file might not be compatible with later builds or the next official release.
A good way to use the features of the latest builds is to develop your project with the latest official release and use the svn builds only for the features needed. For example, use the official release for your project including the particles you don’t like (just so you can get a feel for how the scene is developing). When everything else is completed, delete the particle system and save the project file under a different name. Then, open it with an svn build to use the better particle system for your grass. Save the files with appropriate names to avoid confusion. If any problems occur, your original file isn’t compromised.
With the new particles, greatly reduce the number of particles used and add children to the parent particles to achieve the density you’re looking for…you’ll love it!
Also, you can use more than one particle system with the latest builds so, your grass can easily contain things like weeds, various types of grass, dead grass, etc.!