[square]

Hi,

can anybody guide me to doing a grass field with the camera really low near the ground, high detail grass is what im looking for,



thanks for your time,
www.smilegroup.ee/motion

[3DLaurie]

if its gona be really close just model patches of it in layers and cut and paste it around, could use clone to point thing and spray a load of points where you want the grass or somthing??

[Mark]

OK, there's a nice tutorial that ships with the HD_Instance plugin for doing just this sort of thing (they're actually modelling a field with over 1 billion blades of grass - each a distinct sub-patch object).

The general gist of the process is to first model your grass (simply reshape a tall, thin box with around 3 segments in Y and two in X).

Next in a separate layer make a heavily subdivided plane and kill the polys.

Now in that plane layer, apply jitter in the X and Z axes a few times (use a reasonable spread - if the plane was 1mx1m then jitter over at least 250 mm)

Next, use point clone plus to duplicate the blade of grass over the 1 jittered plane's points (here you can also add some randomness in size, rotation, etc).

Voila - a 1m x 1m patch of grass ready to be placed onto a landscape (you may have to apply deformation if your landscape isn't perfectly flat)...

Now, here is where HD_Instance saves time - normally you'd need to then duplicate this grass object as many times as required to put it across your scene. Using HDInstance, you apply it once then add HDInstance to the ground and the object to cover it and the plugin does the rest at render time...