Developing Grass

At one point during this project I realised one of us had to develop Grass. We have alot of shots up close to the mountain and it will need grass to break up the surface of the ground. Also we might have to create a landscape. So again a nice renderable grass setup would be ideal to add some variation to the ground.

So here are some of the test I did for the development of grass (starting from bottom to top).

After I got the colour it was time to start adding variations in colour and shape of the grass and the 3 images show that I slowly got a nice render that took very little time to render, so the idea of grass isn't as hard as we first thought.

However next step for my development is to work out where to place it on the mountains and painting more variations such as boldness and length.

(bottom image up) These image show the development of the grass. What I started with was the fur plugin for grass, that rendered the bottom image. As you can see very dull loads of gaps and no variation. What I did next was develop this by setting up different options for the grass and adding more stems in total to get that basic landscape I set out full of lush grass. Also Scale had to be played with as you don't want the grass to look long in the distant shots so once we get a camera setup I can adapt to the scene.

Second image show me trying to add wind and variation but as you can see it does it in big clumps not as individual blades. So I took away that variation as it wasn't working. As you can see   you can notice the grey colour behind the grass. This is the plane that the grass is based on. So I changed the colour and the image above shows the difference.