Grass Test using particle flow and MR

[-MerlyN-]

Thanks guys!

 

@Dave Yeah, the bg trees are definitely only a provisorium. They werent meant to be on display that prominently, and the whole image was just a test render, to see, where I am at that moment (since all you see in max is wireframe boxes ).

 

@James Yeah, I hide everything unneeded and have them on their own layers. Though I select and hide/unhide via the maxscript listener, as thats a lot faster than opening the layer window. Really lagging is the small grass pflow I use atm as it has 20000 instances. Maybe I will break that up into different objects. Max seems to handle everything fine until it gets to somewhere near 5000 objects... Havent had any instability issues yet with max2011 though. Its slow as hell for sure, but it hasnt crashed once (I terminated the process a few times manually cause I was bored of waiting, but no crash) which I find kinda amazing, really.

[Macer]

I've also been following this thread along and experimenting when possible.

 

I have run into a problem though. After using PF and baking the meshes, I use the Soulburn Object Dropper script to drop the cylinders to the shape of the ground mesh. The cylinders have random scale and rotation assigned during the PF stage, but the Object Dropper removes the rotation (see image attached).

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39236[/ATTACH]

 

It drops the meshes and they conform to the shape of the ground object, but the rotation of the cylinders is reset!? I have used a squarer shaped cylinder in the image to demonstrate this more clearly. I probably would never have noticed with grass only but I used it for some dandilions which stood out quite clearly as having the rotation removed (even though the cylinders had obviously been randomly rotated (along horizontal plane in PF).

 

Has anyone else come accross this, or have I just got a setting wrong somewhere?

 

Otherwise I think that this technique seems to work quite well.

[jinsley]

I hadn't noticed that or even if it was happening to me, I don't think it was because I think I would have noticed if all the trees, etc. had the same rotation...

 

installing 2011 suite right now... will check later today.

[Macer]

Thanks, that would be great. I've tried it on two different workstations with the same results, but i may well have missed some check box somewhere?!

[Macer]

In the end I used Itoo's Glue plugin. It kept the rotation and conformed to the ground mesh too.

[RyderSK]

I thought I could post "my" approach here. It's pretty fast, it's a combination of Vray 2D displacement as a base, and VrayFur placing based on noise map on top of it.

 

It's a quick setup, so don't pay much attention to the rest (house is one of my unfinished designs, and trees are simple Vyonyx cutouts)

 

It's my first try, soon I will give try to the proxies, but I think I will keep combination of all these techniques together.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]40969[/ATTACH]

[-MerlyN-]

the undergrow (?) displaced grass looks nice, but the furred grass looks too much like fur and not like grass IMO. The larger grass is probably better done with real modeled grass and proxy distribution.

[jinsley]

I have to agree with Nils... the displaced grass looks nice for a base, but the fur falls short... I think once you look into the proxies, or some other ways of generating the longer patches you will get an even better result...

[RyderSK]

You're right. I was bit intimidated by proxy setup, as my approach was super quick to setup, which I allways like :- ). But now with advanced painter I am going to model some patches by myself. Thanks for opinion guys !

[CJI]

Does anyone else experience seriously long wait times for the geometry to switch when using object replacer??

 

I use the Pflow technique especially where sculpted hilly landscape is concerned (read quite drastic level changes, not gentle hills). I bake the pflow to cubes, then drop them with align to surface with object dropper. I then replace all the cubes with proxies. In the most recent case this is 40,000 proxies. While its switching them it took 40 mins to do. Just wondering if this is normal, I've never been able to get this to work quickly and thought id finally ask to see if im doing anything wrong.

 

Cheers

 

CJ

[TSuess]

Jinsley,

 

When drawing the intial patch of grass why Hair and fur and not scatter?

[jinsley]

Does anyone else experience seriously ...

 

... anything wrong.

 

Cheers

 

CJ

 

I get really long translation times also, sometimes 1 - 2 hrs... I think that once you hit a certain number of objects in the scene or in the selection that max just starts to have problems and slow down... it can look like it has crashed/ frozen, but I am pretty sure that it is still working away slowly, and if I leave it over night, most of the time it has finished when I come in the next day...

 

Jinsley,

 

When drawing the intial patch of grass why Hair and fur and not scatter?

 

I like the hair and fur, because:

 

1. I only need to model one blade.

 

2. when you use scatter you are replicating the same blades over and over with slight variance to their geometry... but with hair and fur you can style your clump of grass to have very different looks and no repeated blades very quickly and generate many meshes from the same hair and fur set-up very quickly.

 

I know you don't get the material variation like when you follow PG's work flow, but most of the time I find that you get enough variance just from the light hitting blades at different angles, etc...

[TSuess]

Check out my tutorial for manicured 3d lawns and grasses. C & C welcome. Tutorial Check out my new tutorial on modeling Grass and lawns: http://www.renderededge.com/2011/05/dont-pass-on-grass.html

Edited November 17, 2011 by TSuess

[-MerlyN-]

that link points to cga forums, tom...

[jinsley]

Bad link... here is the tutorial.

 

http://www.renderededge.com/2011/05/dont-pass-on-grass.html

 

Also, to say I developed the technique is mis-leading if not wrong... the way I create grass is based on information shared on Peter Guthrie's blog:

 

http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/

 

and by helpful hints and tips posted by Pixela.

 

Thank you for the credit (which I don't deserve) and I'm glad I could help.

[CJI]

Well written Tutorial and pretty close to the way i hade been approaching the manicured grass, except rather than rendering the "variant" masks i would overly a contrasty slightly blurred concrete texture masked using an ID pass in photoshop and tweak to suit for similar results. Granted yours has slightly more accuracy using the rendered mask and relies far less on hand painting.

 

I still need to devote some time to really honing my results of lush grass ala peter, James, Bertrand and co. I just havent had the time to really make a decent go at it. I have the concepts down just need to set some time to really play with the grass geometry for the blades, i can never get them quite right. haha.

 

Thanks for the tut though tom, its great.