Or more specifically how to create a field of grass using vray proxy objects and the vrayscatter plugin.
Software used: 3dstudio Max, vray (should work with mentalray proxies too), vrayscatter (for alternatives see below), advanced painter (free script)
The first stage is to create some individual blades of grass and then make a small area of grass that can later be distributed thousands of times onto your terrain.
The 3 individual blades of grass were modeled as a plane object with 8×1 segments, collapsed to an editable poly and then I moved the vertices into position in the left and front viewports. You could use a bend modifier as well, just make sure the final object has as few polygons as you can get away with.
I then used a very handy script called advanced painter to ‘paint’ about 100 blades of grass over a 1m x 1m plane object. Set advanced painter to randomize mode, tell it to scatter as copies (not instances), pick the 3 blades of grass as the objects to be scattered and set the min and max scale and z rotation values to something like 0.75 - 1.25 and -45deg +45deg. Then select the plane object, click paint and paint the grass on until it looks like a natural clump of grass. I usually scatter some smaller blades round the circumference of the circle to the clumps blend together better when rendered. Instead of adv. painter, you could also use the 3dsmax compound scatter object, scatter by Peter Watjes, or just do it by hand!
The final stage here, before exporting as a vrayproxy, is to make sure your blades of grass aren’t instances, otherwise you will run into problems later on. I normally collapse all the blades into one object (make one blade unique then attach all other blades to it when in editable poly mode). You could do a reset xform too, for good measure. Another thing I did was to apply a box Uvw map to it before I collapsed it, as I wanted to make the tips of the grass lighter. Right click on the mesh and choose the export to vray proxy option to save it as a vrmesh file.
Now comes the fun part! Choose vrayscatter from create/vray and place it somewhere in your scene. Switch to the edit panel and load up the vrmesh you made in the earlier steps. Then you need to choose your terrain object and at that point you should see lots of boxes being scattered over your terrain.
There are alternatives to vrayscatter as well:
- The makers of vrayscatter are currently working on a new product called multiscatter which will supersede vrayscatter and will also support mentalray proxies.
- Forest by Itoosoft is apparently very capable, and there is a free version so well worth trying out.
- Groundwiz Planter can use vray/mr proxies
- you can just as easily use the free advanced painter script to distribute the proxies once you have made them. It might take a while though, and your viewport will probably slow down after a while
- you could distribute the proxies using 3dsmax particles
Check out part two of this tutorial where I use similar techniques to make shorter grass and go over the material set up for the grass blades. If there’s anything you’d like to see covered in future feel free to make requests in the comments.
Tags: 3d, vray, vrayscatter
Cheers, Peter. I did wonder how you’d put this together when I saw the images pop up a while back - beautiful stuff, and I love the nettles!
Now, that’s what I call a realistic render. Awesome stuff.
woow!
… and this is the tutorial, that the World was waiting for…..
Hi Peter,
This is good stuff!
The first image has some fantastic photo real quality. I never got to really sit and test the new vrayscatter… i hope this post of yours will give me the boost i need.
Onyx Computing came out with onyxgrass recently - might be somthing nice to test along with vrayscatter. even though the 3 blades you use look super fine in the images… those batches of grass i see on the onyx website might look over more super fine.
Peter, what are your impressions about the ram usage and render time for this kind of geometry?
keep it up!
Really impressive !! Can’t wait to try it !!
Nice tutorial and scenery. Did you make the flowers or are they X-Frog/Onyx? I am looking forward to the continuation of this one! Thanks for the great tips Peter.
Thanks! flowers/nettles are xfrog as far as i remember..
yesterday I came across this:
http://architecturalscholar.blogspot.com/2009/03/artists-that-somehow-make-us-look-good.html
Laptop - Location: France
Luxigon - Location: France
Artefactory - Location: France
MIR - Location Norway
Tronic - Location New York
Vyonyx - England
Peter Guthrie - England
Pixelab - Belgium
Hayes Davidson - England
that’s impressive list…..
I get big headed when i look at that… Good to see Philippe there too! (pixelab)
Hi Peter,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. Great tutorial. I would be looking forward to see how you have set up the leaf material.
Many thanks.
Best Regards,
Joost Tangelder
waaaw… great tutorial you got here
thanks for sharing man
thanks buddy
Peter,
Great stuff! Advanced Painter was the first script I have ever installed and used. Even the website for that is great and the tutorial for installing a script was perfect. This is the Holy Grail of grass modeling. Can not wait to see what other tutorials you do. I would love to see something on atmospheric lighting in mental ray, as I don’t use v-ray…Should I be?
Awesome. Struggled for years trying to get decent grass.
Very cool, I am actually trying it right now for evermotion rendering challenge!
Very nice tutorial you have here. I was always looking for a good tutorial about realistic grass and this is it! I’ll try this out. I just hope that my quad core 4gb ram 32bit pc can handle this amount of proxies when rendering. cheers!
vey good job dude thanks for sharin it thanks a lot
thanks
good job man!thank u very much .look forward u next tutorial
não consegur entender porque mal consigo manusia o computador e nao deu para ler em engles
Hi Peter! thanks for sharing. I always made grass with displacement mod, but usually it takes a lot of ram 4-6gb to render, and it doesnt look as good as your mesh grass.
Im also curious about your environment/colomapping… etc settings, looks really realistic, is it vraysky/sun? or hdri? Thanks.
” Set advanced painter to randomize mode, pick the 3 blades of grass as the objects to be scattered and set the min and max scale and z rotation values to something like 0.75 - 1.25 and -45deg +45deg. ” Doesn´t it work. Please show picture settings A.Painter
hm… really like it ))
Hi,,,
It is very great work peter….
i am very new in vray work using 3D max 8 and vray r 1.5 simple
i can control exterior as well as interior lighting can you help me for these ….
again nice work and stuff…
thanks and waiting to new stuff….
give urgently how can make the tiles glossi then lighting also were can i get v ray tutoriyal book
very nice rendering
i tried to follow the tutorial but after making the 3 blades and using the script to paint over a surface it doesn’t look good
here’s how my blades look
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41582643@N03/3833132910/
and after painting
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41582643@N03/3833133004/
thnx and waiting for reply…
Thanks Peter for a great tutorial. It enabled us to make some pretty decent looking 3D grass for a change rather than vray displacement of the old bump. Check out the completed film at http://jamesshaw.co.nz/#/content/Film/Cairo.flv/
If anyone’s interested I’ve written a tutorial building on this and looking at using tools within Max to do similiar things to VRay Scatter at http://www.jamesshaw.co.nz/blog/?p=400
Cheers.
Muy buen Tutorial Excelente, pero me sería mas util en español.
eii, boy, your very good tutorial, fodah same, man will have to use it, maavilhoso.
irmao.trabalho worth with that time and had never seen anything like this, congratulations!
I want to know if we need to apply materials before exporting it to proxy or after.. i do not know how to apply grass material. how can I know if material i apply will look good on grass? how to preview material that ik apply?
thanks for your time PG
Being an absolute, complete and utter beginner with 3DS Max, how did you get the plane to taper to a point on the individual blades of grass?
sir. i would like to ask if you are familiar in golf course rendering…usually all drawings are in cad but i dont know how can i render it it max..i already have the terrain but i cant just drape or put my shapes of greens and fairways that follows my surface.
thanks..hope you are the one
Thanks for this tutorial Peter, i managed to get to this http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nEWSvpdd6Io/Sw34uysudoI/AAAAAAAAAFw/3h306PBDu6E/s1600/test+03.jpg
Grettings form Buenos Aires.
Hi, use advanced painter 1.6 and got problem with scatter: Ther is a defaut min and max scale (0.8 ; 1.2) and when I change these values, there is nothing. Example, I put min and max ( 1 ; 1 ) and there is still scale between 0.8 and 1.2. Sometimes, the painter inverse the objet … I use 3ds max 2009 64bit.
Thank you for your tuto
Look the probleme: http://img704.imageshack.us/i/sanstitresw.jpg/
Thank you
hi:) Great tutorial! The best max grass I have ever seen!
I have one small problem. My grass does not cast shadows. Do you have any idea what`s causing this.
Thank you:)
video tutorial grass tuto pleas
ı dont read english
ı am form turkey
Hi Peter, i have used your tutorial to build fantastic grass (thank you very much, great stuff) however the grass i have built is a tad taller than in your tutorial and i would like it to be able to react to wind. Is there a way to do this. Cheers, Mike
If you make your grass lean mostly in one direction, you can animate the rotation of it using vrayscatter. There are video demos on their website, looks pretty convincing and also quite easy to do as it only requires static proxies.
tengo un problema, todo va bien hasta que creo el vrayscatter, selecciono el archivo vrmesh, y cuando selecciono el terreno aparecen todas las cajas….y ahora???
donde esta el pasto?? que me falta hacer???
in english:
I have a problem, everything is fine until I think the vrayscatter, vrmesh select the file, and when I select the field are all the boxes …. and now??? where is the grass? I need to do???
Thnx for the awesome tut….though i was able to replicate the above technique, i still lack theoretical knowledge on the subject, esp vrayproxy…can u plzz write a short tut on proxies…any good resources on this topic???
Thank you very much Peter!!
as always you bring us super stuff,
Best regards
nice & thanks…………………….
thanks 4 nice post………
Thank you, Peter. It was really helpful for me. I’m translating your grass tutorials into korean for whom not good at english(I’m also not good at english, though…) but need some good tutorials.
http://blog.naver.com/premier7/50087482445
If you dont want it, please let me know.
thats fine alienchicken
Thank you so much … one question, cause im trying to make a video… have you tried to animate the grass, im trying to figure it out… or could u give us any advice on how to do it? to simulate wind… Thanks again!
very good. amazing how much detail it takes to be realistic. btw I think the nettles could do with some short fine white hair, that would be picked out by the light.
also cobwebs and a few flying bugs and then it’d be 99% real!
Hello Peter, this tutorial is really interesting, but believe it or not, I can’t create a blade of grass at the beginning of the tutorial …. I am ashamed at not being able to model a simple thing, but since I find your most effective method I found. Please tell me, how to create the blades, step by step. There is a chance you could send me only the model of blades?
Thank you … keep giving us your wonderful pictures and tips!
Peter F.
Great Tut Peter i love your techniques!