Grass Test using particle flow and MR

[Dave Buckley]

cool, i'll send it over now, much appreciated jinsley

[Dave Buckley]

in all honesty i think your right about the grass-o-matic

 

i've just gotten rid of all the grass and replaced my pflow with a really high poly tree instead and it rendered out fine.

 

better model my own grass geometry

[jinsley]

Dave, did you send that file? Just checking, I kinda figure you decided not to...

[Justin Hunt]

Another nice trick to help speed things up when calculating FG in to reduce the FG Quality setting in the A&D material of the grass and leaves.

 

jhv

[jinsley]

Another nice trick to help speed things up when calculating FG in to reduce the FG Quality setting in the A&D material of the grass and leaves.

 

jhv

 

true... but I have found that when reducing the fg for trees... they can really dark near their centers.

 

another update, starting to lay out a site... still have alot of landscaping to do, but rendered over night just for fun to check out the progress...

 

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[Dave Buckley]

where are your skies from?

[jinsley]

cg textures -> 360 skies -> many different types

 

I love the site, but you don't need to buy a membership to get decent maps for reflections, etc...

 

1. download the largest available size...

 

2. bring into ps, adjust curves to your liking, ctrl + shift I (image size), resize to 300 dpi @ 10000 px wide.

 

3. filters, noise -> median (1-4 pixels blend should be fine) to get rid of some of the noise from scaling up the image.

 

4. drop into environment slot, instance into your mat editor to set up and you should be good to go. If you render larger than 3000 px you will probably have to replace the sky in ps but they do great jobs for reflections, etc...

 

Hope that helps...

[jinsley]

sorry, forgot link

 

http://www.cgtextures.com/

[jinsley]

Sorry this took me so long... hope it helps, this is only my set-up, based on stuff I have read on other forums and from my own little experiments.

 

if something doesn't make sense, let me know and I will try and explain better... its pretty late so I might have missed a thing or 4.

 

The pdf explains the MR material I used to texture the foliage in this image:

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and here is the material set-up:

 

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[CJI]

Hi Jinsley,

I've been following your updates and i must say bravo, Your MR grass is looking fantastic. I have also been doing as much experimentation where time allows and have met with various amounts of success. The Pflow placement method actually saved by behind on a large landscape image i had to produce with a breakwater (20,000 random rocks) in the forground and huge forest (5 - 10,000 mid - high poly trees) receding in to the background. My problems with the method have never been rendering related but more instability of the software when dealling with such a huge amount of instances. As well as processing time to bake the geometry and swap over to the proxies.

 

Grass however is different. I have managed to create a reasonably passable attempt at grass on a flat surface using proxy patches, however i am curious how you managed to get the smae technique to look so good on un-even landscape as the disc patches never seem to sit right on hilly surfaces.

 

Also the shades of green and the variations of the colour of the grass make a huge difference to the believability of the grass itself, i couldn't believe the difference i minor shift in shade made to the grass. Do you use a noise map to add variation to your grass over large areas with a mix map or similar?

 

Your foliage is very similar to the one i use apart from your additional map in the translucency. that is a very good idea, i dont think i ever got it looking quite right. I used a gray scale transparency map in the 'back' slot of the two sided shader to vary the translucency which was a block colour. I think yours works far better to be honest. Is your grass texture the same?

 

Thanks for sharing your process, its fantastic seeing how you've improved you techniques and really helps me hone mine. I will post a test of my own soon.

 

P.S. My process is very similar to yours. I always think my images are cack until i've adjusted the colours ect in photoshop. Its good to see im not the only one.

[jinsley]

Thx very much for the kind comments.

 

I have been dealing with the instability issue with large scenes by relying on layer management... I find it helps a lot.

 

I don't use a noise map or even multiple maps for the grass. Each type of grass (sml, med, lrg) has an individual material, but as per proxy, they are the same shader applied to every blade. I rely on the geometry in combination with light and shadow to create the variations in colour tone.

 

I think the additional map in the translucency gives you more control. Not every plants leaves have the same physical characteristics... some transfer less light than others... this can be adjusted by increasing or decreasing the output of the translucency map.

 

I don't have much more down time today so I just scanned my sketchpad where I tend to write down my thoughts, etc... and put it all on one page in PS.

 

hope it helps... and that you can read my writing.

 

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[Dave Buckley]

jinsley, been a great insight, and can clearly see you've put a lot of thought into it. i think a collection of pages from peoples sketchbooks would make a really interesting book if split properly into relevant chapters etc.

 

do you just tend to sketch whenevery something pops into your head, or is it part of your project workflow?

 

i.e do you have a certain stage during a project where you put your mouse, spaceball, tablet pen down and go sit in another room with a pen and paper (or pen and base render) and sketch down ideas/thoughts to help get towards the final product?

[jinsley]

A compilation would be rad. Doodles and sketches from 10 people who are influential to our industry... architects, illustrators, programmers, clients, etc...

 

I sketch A LOT throughout the day when I read the forums, work through models, ride the sky train, or sometimes just need a break... and definitely when something pops into my head. I don't have time to investigate information I read or ideas so they go right onto a thick pad of 8.5 x 11 I have, and then I get to them eventually. It holds everything from calculations, to roof details and even some doodles from lying in the backyard with my 2 year old.

 

I have started to do shot and project planning in a more visual way rather than writing notes. Its a heck of a lot more fun to do 10 or 15 thumbnails and get a clear idea of where I want to go rather than start to model with no clear idea of what I am trying to achieve graphically and where my attention to detail should be focused. After establishing a shot and doing some tone studies with grey copic markers, I know where I am going and have a better idea of what I need to do to get from point A to Point B. I don't let myself spend more than an hour to do it and I have been shaving hours and days off the time it takes to complete a set of images.

 

I don't know if there is a bad stage to sketch at during a project, its something loose and fresh on the eyes and not nearly as linear as picking points with a mouse.

 

Anyways, I could go on and on... eventually I might make a point. I think everyone should take 15 mins a day and sketch. That would be an interesting thread, eh! People emptying out all their visual garbage and sharing it with the community... haha.

[Dave Buckley]

james

 

in the sketch you posted, i have a question. what do you mean at the bottom about the hair and fur instance node?

 

do you not model individual blades of grass - based on your 'for suckers' note

[Dave Buckley]

and how are you aligning the baked mesh to the surface once you've raised it?

[Dave Buckley]

it's ok i've done it using objectDropper script from Neil Blevins

[jinsley]

james

 

in the sketch you posted, i have a question. what do you mean at the bottom about the hair and fur instance node?

 

do you not model individual blades of grass - based on your 'for suckers' note

 

I make a mesh with 3 or 4 sections, shape to what I think a blade of grass looks like... make a circle -> convert to editable mesh, subdivide, add hair and fur modifier. use the H and F instance node and pick the blade of grass shape and adjust the parameters to make it look correct for scale and size...

 

by doing this you can rip off 5 or 6 grass meshes really fast. I think a lot of guys model individual blades and apply multiple materials to get the colour variation, but I find that you get a lot of variation from just the shade and highlights on a mesh with one material.

 

it's ok i've done it using objectDropper script from Neil Blevins

 

Neil Blevins is rad. His CG Education section has been extremely helpful to me as far as both theory and practical application go.

 

Dave, do you want me to send you a link to download a file I put together for a co-worker to show him how I am modeling my grass with hair and fur?

[Dave Buckley]

if you can that would be great, i think i've done everything as i should though now:

 

only problem i seem to be having is getting the baked cylinders fromn the particle flow to follow the contours of the landscape.

 

i thought object dropper had done it, but appears as though some went below the surface.

 

i just want to be able to select all of my baked cylinders, then hit something that aligns to the curvature of my landscape and then replace them with my proxy object.

 

the only thing i think i'm doing different is that i'm controlling the placement of grass with 'distribution maps' so i can specify areas that have long grass, short grass etc, but this means having as many maps and pflow objects for as many different grass patches i have.

 

so i'm kind of distributing normal grass to everything, long grass with a distribution map (basically my tree distribution map) , then i'm hand painting all other proxies where needed, and deleting some others to give balder patches.

[jinsley]

...

 

only problem i seem to be having is getting the baked cylinders fromn the particle flow to follow the contours of the landscape.

 

i thought object dropper had done it, but appears as though some went below the surface.

 

...

 

hmm... I wonder if that happens to me too and I just haven't noticed... how many go below? This is just a few of them right? If not, when you use the object dropper, are you checking the align to ground option? is the base for the cylinder at the bottom and centered?

[Dave Buckley]

hmm... I wonder if that happens to me too and I just haven't noticed... how many go below? This is just a few of them right? If not, when you use the object dropper, are you checking the align to ground option? is the base for the cylinder at the bottom and centered?

 

i'd unchecked rotation :$

[jinsley]

Dave,

 

sent you a link to that max file form my home email... insley

[Dave Buckley]

james that is awesome

 

so if i'm correct, you create a single blade, create the circle, model a blade, add hair a fur to circle, style hair to suit type of grass patch you want to create, instance node the single blade, reset xform, then proxy?

[-MerlyN-]

Been following this thread for several weeks now, and playing along when time permits.

Below find my first result. I must say, I'm pretty happy with it so far, though it still bears room for a lot of improvements.

 

Really annoying though is, that max gets really slow when it has to handle tens of thousands of proxies, most notably, when updating the pflows or assigning materials.

[Dave Buckley]

looking good nils, however, i think the only thing spoling that for me, is the array of cutout trees in the background. give it a bit of sharpen up and you're there, a few different plant variations other than the the poppy.

 

that gives me an idea. a poppy field

[jinsley]

Nils! Looks really good! The speed lag is annoying... I used to get it really bad too, I think that it is just something to do with max starting to lose its stability. You can make it a little better by putting each pflow on its on layer and shutting it off until you are ready to render... I usually try not to have more than one foliage layer on at a time.

 

I saw your pm, but haven't had time to answer... I have 2 or 3 deadlines to meet tomorrow, so I will get to it asap on friday...

 

Dave, that's almost exactly how I do it... except I instance the blade before I style so I can see the final outcome...