Creating Barley/Wheatfields in max

[benjaminmoore]

So i want to make a wheatfield for a project im currently working on, I tried using multiscatter to distribute 3 different strands of wheat, this method was very heavy on my render times. Which of course for anyone isnt ideal.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has any alternative methods i could use, perhaps opacity maps?

 

Thanks,

[Umesh Raut]

Depends on what you want to do. If its a still, using 3D for near camera and opacity maps for distant areas is ideal, but animation makes it more tricky. Like have 3D objects on and around the camera path, similar to the earlier, but with more real objects and less fake/mapped ones. Animation also invites little more work on sun/light matching and such things.

[benjaminmoore]

its for a still, so what do you suggest? using 3d for maybe the first 10 meters then opacity maps for the rest of the scene, the final shot will be fairly wide so i want to put as much deatil as i can into the foreground. would i have to create the maps from the existing geometry? or is there somewhere i could grab some existing maps from?

[Umesh Raut]

Stills are easier with geometry in the foreground, there's no rule how far you need to go. Just check various lengths of 3D field and decide for yourself. But you need to search for good maps for the background that match your lighting too, not just the geometry maps. Search search and search.

[benjaminmoore]

im sure i can pick maps that arent perfect for the initial render, but can be corrected when i begin post processing? alot of the lighting will be done in photoshop anyway so would it really be that much of a problem? sorry for my lack of knowledge in this area, ive only really used geometry for my scattered objects such as grass, never really used any other methods.

[Umesh Raut]

Sorry mate, don't know about 'a lot of the lighting being done in Photoshop', but seems you are on right track. Its always trial and error when you're learning new stuff anyways. So, good luck, and don't forget to post the results.

[benjaminmoore]

Alrighty, thanks anyway and will do!

[Chris MacDonald]

Something like this would be easy-as-pie in 3D with a couple of animated proxies and multiscatter/forest pack/groundwiz.

[benjaminmoore]

I was planning on using multiscatter, i have forest pack too but im not really familiar with how to proxy objects. ive made a couple of wheat/barely strands to proxy but my ddr2 ram is struggling with the load. i know displacement is a bit heavy as far as ram/cpu usuage is concerend, but do you think that using a mixture of proxy, displacement and opacity maps would improve render speeds? just curious.

[Nic H]

your best bet is to use a dynamic scatter (like multiscatter) with some good models (i-grass have some really nice wheat fields and models in the sample pack)

 

it will take a lot of memory so might need to up your ram. displacement wont help you here and pure opacity wont look great.

 

there is a distance falloff by camera checkbox so there are less in the background. or you could render out a flat version with the alpha and put that back into max as a background plane / matte.

 

http://rendering.ru/ru_en/igrass-vol1.html

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I've gotten good mileage for grass and gravel with proxies of groups. With Mental Ray. There are two secrets I found lurking on the web: turn scanline off, switch to bsp2. Each group has a bunch of different items with some variety thrown in. Then the group is painted on the ground with rotation and scaling variety - though if your wheat is leaning over in the breeze or following the sun you may want to watch the randomness on rogation.

[benjaminmoore]

igrass looks brilliant! i'll buy it when i get home, just out of thought hows the poly count for the models in the pack? do they have any other packs for trees ect?

[pailhead]

They do, and their trees are great. Grass package however is VERY poly heavy.

[Jason Matthews]

This may be a little late, but I use Forest Pack for tons of foliage. You don't need to worry about a proxy object. Insert the model (wheat strand) in the scene, create a closed spline for the area you want the wheat to be in. Select the forest pack plugin and select the spline. Then choose custom geometry from the list and select the wheat strand. Then click the transformation tab and auto rotate, scale, etc. That's it. The great thing about Forest Pack is that you only calculate and render what is in the camera's view, nothing outside of it. Just be careful when dealing with reflections because the geometry will disappear out of the reflection if your boundary is not large enough. Do a search on youtube for "Itoo Software'. There are some videos on all of this.