Smokin Grass!

Richard

Digging this post up from days gone past...

Richard,

I'm just getting into using Maxwell to render my SU models so I'm going through a couple of your old threads to try and learn your process because I really like the images you post. Anyway, I'm running into the same issue you have w/ huge problems with either displacement or clip maps to render grass. Unluckily, the buildings I do are hospitals so I can't afford the extra render time for all of the grass around a massive building. But luckily, my views are normally such that a flat rendered plane of grass doesn't look to bad w/ some post-processing.

But I'm really intrigued by this idea of 2 planes of grass. How has this worked out for you? Do you have any renderings you can post where you've used this effect? Could you post the maps so I can get a better idea of what you're talking about? In particular, I'm interested in what that top layer clip map would look like. Inverse of the bump map perhaps?

Thanks,

-Brodie

Sorry for the late reply mate!

The dual layer grass option I was testing honestly just didn't work! The grass still tended in all tests to just look more like flat swept grass that a straight flat texture!

I had much better results with displacement and found render times not too bad if the settings are right. Though must say haven't used them in any production renders yet due to like you flat maps still suiting the purpose!

brodie

I tested out the 2 planes using a bump map just brightened up a bit as the clip plane and it worked out much better than I expected! A little funky around the trees and such where you can sort of see the top plane but otherwise it's wonderful. Most of my renderings are of very large buildings to I was looking for a mid to long range solution and I think this should work out quite well. It seems to give it just enough variety and shadow to help give the illusion of more depth than is really there. Thanks for the original tip.

Any other tips particular to SU -> Maxwell that might come in handy? Right now I'm working on my first interior rendering. Looking ok but not as well as I'd hoped. My lighting seemed much weaker than I thought but luckily I was able to help that out in Multilight. And the glass seemed to make things noisier than I'd have hoped. The best that I've run across for speed is ags dielectric. Any other advice there?

Thanks Richard,

-Brodie

Richard

Hey Brodie

Would love to see your own results with the two plane grass!

It's hard to give direct tips for maxwell unless you have a direct issue! One big tip is too avoid whites that are above 224 white! These will really slow your renders down! The AGS is the absolute saviour toward interior and exterior renderings!

brodie

Here's my little test. Those are Solo's palm trees by the way.

-Brodie

2kemon

...that's a pretty good result brodie. Is the the grass very dependent on the viewpoint?
Most of the times I only need my grass to look good from a mid-range viewpoint, but every now and then I like to pick my views from almost insect height, and then I need another grass texture.And I'm not very happy with the results of using a high-grass clip map.

@richard
Did you create those fantastic grass textures in photoshop, or are the from a texture pack? I think some of your first result with minimal tiling a great!

brodie

2Kemon, so far the grass doesn't seem to be very dependent on the viewpoint and it works quite well from mid to far range. I used the regular grass texture for the bottom plane and the same texture for the top plane w/ the bump map as the clip map. I had to up the brightness on the clipmap by 25%-50% for it to clip out the right amount of grass from the top plane.

-Brodie

brodie

btw, if you look close enough around the trees (like the very bottom right of my image) you can see the clip mapped grass which looks rather pixelated. easy enough to touch up in photoshop though.

solo

In Vue you have the option to use displacement which does not tax the render as much as other render engines, however it has a better feature called 'ecosystems' whick paints actual geometry in the foreground and based on your input it changes the L.O.D based on your desired distance, even converting the 3d mesh into billboards to reduce the poly count.

Here is a sphere with an ecosystem on it, rendered in just under 2 minutes. I made it patchy as I wanted to also show the low rez image texture that has a slight displacement added.

2kemon

Cool, Brodie. I think I'll give it a shot. I just spent a few pounds on the grass textures from ambient light. They have a 50% discount on all their products at the moment, and they have quite a few brilliant textures! "wink" "wink"
@solo
...i've seen some of your results with vue, and it made me take a closer look.
After watching the breathtaking feature demonstration videos a read quite a few reviews.
Quite a few of them reported about crashes. What are your experiences with vues stability? And how can you use it in your sketchup workflow? I hope I'm not hijacking the thread, but if that's the case I'll start a proper thread, 'cause I'm really interested in hearing about Vue.

brodie

really interesting feature Solo. Do you have a rendering where you've used that ecosystem?

-Brodie