Grass with the hair and fur modifier?!

[Gary Ledgerwood]

So I have been struggling with this for two days now and I need help before I punch my monitor. I know that has been discussed ad nauseam but I am looking for an easy way to do up close grass in Mental Ray with the tools that I have at my disposal. I have looked over various forums and downloaded a ton of different materials and models and I can’t get anything to work the way that I want it to. This is obviously my first attempt at 3D grass. I think that I want to use the Hair and Fur modifier but every time I render, the grass is just a white mass. I have turned off all lights and exposure control and I get the same results. I found a post on this forum saying to add my materials under the MR Parameters area of the Hair and Fur modifier and that doesn’t work either. Perhaps it’s because I still don’t understand the difference between materials and shaders? Any help with this would be appreciated. I have tried 50 different things with the same results each time. Very frustrating.

[jinsley]

a thread I had going a while ago... I still work pretty much the same way whenever I have to do some foliage/ grass...

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/37505-grass-test-using-particle-flow-mr-6.html

 

I would steer clear of the H and F, and start working with proxies... what version of max are you on?

[Gary Ledgerwood]

Thank you for the link James. I will start reading. I ended up comping my grass in Photoshop just to get this image out. It looks alright, but I think 3D would have been the way to go.

 

I am on Max 2011 64bit. I have an I7 with 12GB of RAM so I am not overly concerned about render times. I just want the best results with what I have. I am embarrased to say, but to be honest, I dont really know how to model anything in Max. Everything is modeled in Autocad or Sketchup and then rendering in Max. I saw a tutorial somewhere about creating a few blades of grass and then scattering them, but I couldnt even model the grass. Lame I know. I found a grass model online, brought it in an scattered it, but I didnt like the results. I have a lot of learning to do.