EASY Question. Making Grass
 

Since you guys have been so helpful, I'm going to keep asking questions. Hopefully I'm not annoying you all.

What is the easiest way to make a scene that has realistic grass. I know there is the grass "painter", but it always looks uneven. Is there a way to attach grass to say a BLINN or something so it's even throughout whatever I apply it too? That's what I do when I want to make a scene with SAND (using a JPG from a picture of my daughters sandbox).

Is this a dumb question?

Chris, Baltimore

it would be dumb to not ask questions :)

there is a grass generator script called ss_makeGrass.mel


but to tell you the truth, I don´t quite understand the question. is it about creating grass as a geometry or making use of a normalmaps or just about the shader color?

Well the easy option is to use maya fur or hair if you want uniformed grass, you can create baldness maps etc to paint it out of place you dont want it to appear.

Paint fx is great for this type of work too but the settings are quite complicated as opposed to fur.

to attach grass to a blinn wouldnt look as good at the end of the day because you are looking at alpha channels and if you are animating the scenes the grass would look flat

cheers
Jay

Thanks guys......sorry for not being clear.

I've tried to place grass on a plane but it always looks uneven (like I can't paint it well). I was wondering if there was an easy way to have grass very uniform. Check out this youtube clip that I just found while trying to give an example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC722...eature=related

I think the idea of using Fur may be an idea. I just tried that really quickly and it looks ok. Can I actually "apply" a grass to this or would I say use the "bear" fur and just change the color to green?

Thanks guys.

The method in that video is actually painted grass in photoshop with an alpha channel attached,

then imported the collor map and alpha channel in to the scene.

Then adding this maps to a blinn on to a plane.

Why i can see it, is the fact that it has pixelated edges when the camera zooms in, this is a method mostly used in gaming,

Also in animations, but more as a matte painting background, out of focus scenes.

If you want close ups, paint fx or fur would be the best way to go.

To find out how to do this best to follow a tutorial
http://www.3dlessons.com/tutorials/R...aya-65776.html

Or if you really like you can just experiment yourself without a tutorial, btw paint fx has a couple preset brushes you can use.

Cool tute

Personally if I had fur at my disposal I would use that, theres better control, you can paint your grass diraction manually instead of relying on the more procedural style settings that paint fx has.

cheers
Jay

Thanks for the info. I feel really lost that I'm not completly understanding how you import/export "alpha channels" using photoshop (and I'm not expecting you to answer in this thread). I have a lot to learn but I love Maya so I'll keep trucking along.

Thanks guys.

Chris

i made a step by step on creating the alpha channel.
This is not a tutorial how to create grass, but how steps from just a standard paint fx grass to 2d image matte paint looking grass

http://www.aikoworld.com/blog/2008/0...annel-in-maya/