Just a quick scene with the new Orchad grass (2 particle systems), perennial ryegrasss (3 particle systems), generic dead grass, dead oak leaves and ribwort plantain (2 particle systems)
Hope you like it. Making scenes like this is incredibly fast, I needed about 20 minutes for scene building and another 20 minutes for post. Criticism is always welcome 
nothing here to criticize. Great work. Looks real.
You edited this out of your comment, but I hope you don’t mind my bringing it back: "But make some leaves broken, eaten by insects. You know, some holes in leaves for even more realism.”
This isn’t a bad idea and it can be easily done procedurally in the node editor. And I don’t think it would add too much to render-times. Maybe an option to enable procedural alpha masks?
No problem. But I saw some of the leaves closely and they have holes. That’s why I removed it. No matter how realistic grass and other stuff you make, it is not real if all of the leaves look untouched. I hope he includes these procedural holes you mention. 
So I tried something and it looks pretty cool in my opinion:
Further more, I have decided to get rid of the seasons settings and instead have an age slider which affects the material, geometry and, in some cases, includes different model variations. I’m considering these wholes to be included in that age setting, too.
So while Julius is working on the models, I’ve been working on the addon to interface with it all.
This is what it looks like so far:
Keep in mind that those will not be the final icons.
‘Flavor’ refers to variants of a species: long, flower, short, cut, etc.
Here is my current icon proposal, though Julius has some ideas in mind as well:
These are for ryegrass big, btw
As some of you may have already seen on twitter, I did some dead leaves and started on the barley:
Oh and by the way, I just found that image of the grass essentials and had some fun using one of their own marketing techniques by comparing a random asset to their grass :
Hope you like it If you want more updates, I’m currently trying to get a bit more active on twitter, so if you like what I do, please support me there!
what does it mean ? where do both assets come from ?
Left one is from there, right one is my orchad grass 
Andrew Price’s Grass Essentials on the left, Graswald on the right.
Andrew is going to have some serious competition.
I’d go as far as to call it unfair competition.
Of course it depends on the price. Do you have a more precise idea now ? (if you don’t mind telling us)
Why is it unfair? I have thought about the price, it will be below 60 dollars for sure, I’m thinking about 49$ as a starting price, and if new things will be added, it might increase, but that’s future stuff 
it’s not unfair. I just don’t know what expression is used when a product has superior quality while being less expensive than another.
But really I think you shouldn’t go too low. The total income is not inversely proportional to the price of the product. There’s always an optimal price to give. And if you want to
you should chose your price carefully and put your generosity aside a bit. Personally, I think 60 could be used as a start and increase with major updates.
As long as it starts lower than the grass essentials, it will make noise and people will prefer it unless they want bushes and weeds (btw do you plan to make some in the future ?).
In any case a price is not fixed forever. You can decrease it after a while. However if you realize it was too low for your needs, increasing it just for that reason will likely make everyone upset.
That is true, people hate it when prices are raised. Better to start even higher and lower it a little if needed.
Interesting, I never knew they were doing this, it would be interesting to know what species they sell. I’d be grateful for any inspirational information as the grass essentials were and are my main inspiration. On the blendermarket, I could only find informations about weeds and grass, not about bushes… Oh, and what do you mean by weed, as that’s just a name for plants which grow somewhere where people don’t want it!
for some reason I can’t reach the Grass Essentials page on Blender Guru. I get a timeout every time. Does it work for you ?
It is working for me. Probably your internet connection problem.
it works now. Maybe the site was saturated at that moment.
I didn’t know that’s what weed means. So actually you have some already.
Anyway I was mistaking about bushes. The grass essentials doesn’t include any.
About the side-by-side comparison you did, it seems a bit unfair since they did many species of plants, some being also included in Graswald, but you compared different species.
The comparison was not about comparing which version comes closer to the original, but rather the features a grass model can have, for example if it has sheaths, nodes and collars or if it’s just a leaf stuck in a stem. That’s something every grass possesses, despite the species:
This image for example shows the bermuda grass, the species from the grass essentials:
As you can see, it has a sheath and a collar, and probably a node which you can’t see in that picture… If you don’t know what I am talking about, look at this 
http://www.thelawninstitute.org/content/files/mod.pages/uploads/Education/plantdiagram.jpg
