After having posted the tutorial on how to create a night rendering I’ve been asked a several times through both comments and emails, how I did the grass in that rendering. Therefore, I’ve decided to do a little tutorial about creating grass as well.
1) Create a plane, or a surface that will lately become the grass.
2) Apply whatever tilebale texture on the diffuse chanel.
3) Apply a planar UVW modifier to the plane or surface you have just created.
4) Apply a vray displacement modifier above the uvw in the modifier stack.
-under “paramenters” check “2d mapping”
-under “common params” select a displacement map for your grass.
This is actually the most important factor; if your displacement map is not good, you will never get the grass to look right, regardless of the texture that you have used for the diffuse slot.
I have actually obtain good results only by using a procedural “smoke” map with various shades of green, without actually using a texture. If you don’t have a good displacement map, you can use mine.
Download grass displacement texture.
-next to “amount”, type in how much you want the grass to be displaced. For this scene (since I’ve chose meters as units),I have typed 0.18
-under “2d mapping”, “resolution” type 1024 (if you leave it at 512 it will look more like boulders than grass).
5)If necessary you can adjust the tiling of the vray displacement map. You can do that by dragging the texture to an emty slot in the material editor and select “instance” when the question will pop.
That’s it! As simple as that.
I always look forward to hearing your suggestions reagarding what tutorials should I write, so if you have any ideas feel free to contact me either by commenting here, or by email (cgdigest(at)gmail.com).
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What would you do different for just mental ray?
To be honest, I haven’t touched mental ray in about 3-4 years, so I’m really not the one to be giving advices about that.
Sorry…
[...] that the vray fur is applied to, or if you need to render at a very high resolution); if not using vray displacement is the way to go. If you decide that you need that you need a very high level of detail in your [...]
would you help us in creating curtains in 3d max?
Thanks for the suggestion. Generally I do curtains using the simcloth plugin that is very simple and intuitive. I will try to do a short tutorial on that though.
Thank you so much for the tutorial, been modelling Engineering stuff for years, my effective grass and plants modelling is not so good, and this helped lots, thank you once again.
Anthony James
How do you make your grass different levels, say one part of your scene had the grass at the height you have set, and in other parts on the plane it is trampled right down… Is there a way to create a custom displacement map in photoshop for this? That’s the only way I can think of doing it…
Yep.. the only way around it would be to create the displacement map with that in mind…
hi,its not working when i give the vraydisplacementmod to the plane
how i must to do/?
Hello morteza,
Either you have missed one of the steps, or you are not working with the correct scale. For example, if your plane has 1000m x 1000m and you are trying to fit it entirely in the viewport, than the displacement is not noticeable.
Please double check and let me know if it works for you.
P.S. Have you assigned vray as current renderer?
Nice one thanks, works well.
Can you explain how to change the color of the grass? I need to get kind of green yellowish color…
Thanks
Simple and effective. Thanks a lot for your tip (and texture, btw).
Hi thanks for this tutorial. However I dont have vray in my 3ds mAX 2010. Tried to look for vray download. Can you help me? Thank you! Architect from Philippines
Hello Lois,
Vray is not included in the 3ds max package. It is an additional rendering engine that you need to purchase from chaosgroup.com