Most Realistic Grass for Close Up
feldarzt
Posts: 204
Hi guys,
It's me and vegetation again :)
I've had a few similar topics before, so I apologize for the seeming multiple posts. The goals of the threads and searches differ.
So, to the point. I need the most realistically looking grass available.
Ideally, it would be capable of populating an area or plane with different versions of itself, or include a lot-like plot (not a huge field!) with dense grass of various kinds. Even more ideally, the resulting grass patch would not have a perfect geometric shape, but instead be somewhat chaotic and random, yet dense.
The goal is to camouflage the border between the ground and the road in a scene, and to make some close-ups of that road and the grass around it.
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Comments
The store has several products with grass in them.
Here are a couple:
https://www.daz3d.com/grass--crack-fillers-and-clumps
https://www.daz3d.com/li-elemental-dynamics--grass-patches
Mesh is mesh, if the colours are off or the quality of the image isn't as detailed as desired one can apply other texture images to them. With a camera one can take all kinds of photos of grass to use for texturing.
eta: And for some variety, one can get interesting results with this product:
https://www.daz3d.com/the-foliagemaker
https://www.daz3d.com/g3d-da-grass-and-plant-pack This one is pretty good. There used to be a freebie grass on erock3d, that seems to be gone now however. But the Gendragon grass is quite good as well.
The gendragon grass is really good (Linked above, g3d pack) - although it can be pretty intensive since it relies on instances. Here's a couple test renders I had done using it when building an environment. I do have to hide all the instances in the viewport (since there are thousands of them, that slow the viewport to a crawl) and the scene is a little slow to load, but overall I'm very happy with it. Much better than grass planes.
Do you have UltraScenery? The earliest Grasslands biomes with US are pretty good for that, and despite having tens/hundreds of thousands of instances are surprisingly lightweight. Includes weeds, if that's any use, and US can have a tarmac/asphalt road surface. If you wish to limit the size to a smallish area, you could use your own height map to make a limited surface at the height you want and everywhere else much lower and mask those areas so you don't have vegetation there.
Attached image shows the accuracy of the plants.
Regards,
Richard
Richard, you're awesome as always!
This custom height map idea is brilliant, and I haven't thought of it.
@feldzart: brilliant I'm not, it's Artini who has done quite a number of height map images in the US thread that reminded me you don't have to stick with 64mx64m if you don't want to, but could reduce some of the elevation to see exactly the garden shape you wanted. It's not as easy as it could be, I will admit, and masking the vegetation etc takes thought, but it can be done & the models in UltraScenery are so good, even with pretty close up views.
It's the really good thing about this forum, ideas spark off other ideas and almost everyone ends up doing better than they would otherwise do.
Regards,
Richard
Quixel or Polyhaven