Realistic Grass Anyone????

February 4, 2008

The sole reason I registered here is so I could force you, wbroberts, to tell me how you made that field of grass.

I'm mainly using MR, but I guess I could render just my grass in scanline if it's as fast as you say.

You feel like sharing your secret or the plugin you used?

Edit: Ohh, think I found it.

Is it Fabio Policarpo's Relief Mapping plugin v.1.8 you're using? I tested it in scanline now and it even works in max 2008. Good times.

Edit2: I've been testing it some now and while I get good results with the usual brick and tile texture, grass is not giving me good results. It's not getting any height at all. Would you be so kind as to show me the map you used for getting those results? Mainly the normal/depth map.

Thanks.

I'm glad to see others are as bothered by this age old problem of grass as I am.....

Yes, that plugin works the best with some tweaking....there is still a problem with it when you get into silhouttes on NURBS type surface meshes etc.....it handles curves and planes fine.....but those silhoutte details are important around structures etc for grass....I've attached my settings....you can just use his stone (with the tiling set pretty small which resembles Max's cellular procedural) or create normal with depth mapping with the Nvidia normal plugin for photoshop.....or GIMP has one too....I could attach my own grass shader later if needed....just real busy getting a building modeled right now.....but I find it very encouraging that I can get these results in 41 seconds.....