hi all,

i am working in architecture visualisation and my main professional concern is placing building objects in a presentable environment. the images are done at home with vue7 ple, in the office i am using 7 xStream.

right now i am working on getting my grips on grass.

i have found two ways. one is a "color" material that emulates the look of grass from a distance. the other is populating ecosystem grass.

this pic is the color mat approach.

this is the same with ecosystem

and here a closeup

so how can i improve this?

i find the grass is looking more like grass in "wild" nature than a lawn around a house. i would like to change the colour and the placement (density is @100% but does not look completely covered) of the eco grass (esp the border around the house looks strange). also i am looking for tricks on handling polysize as with this test image its high already.

i am not expecting a single solution for this but am more interested in tips/strategies/tutorials etc. in the right direction so i can get more experience and understanding how to work better with vue.

thanks in advance

for a fuller grass you can scale it down a bit and then maybe use a different color map. With the eco this way you can uncheck dissolve near objects to get. You can also put the density well abouve 100% to like 5000. Kinda hard to get it fuller and more clean without raising the polycount.

A lot could be said about this topic. It's more complex than it seems at first sight. Some hints, with no special order:

1- to get the 100% coverage on the eco grass, you need to disable the "decay near foreign objects".

2- you can put the density higher than 100%. Just not use the slider but rather type in any number.

3- The default grass that comes with Vue is rubbish, IMHO. There are several good grass items in Cornucopia 3D. Look at stuff from Linda Daireaux or Willy, for example, just to name two. There's a very good grass (not VEG, but VOB) in Renderosity free stuff (or I think it used to be, I'm not sure if it's here anymore) by bigbraader.

4- I would say your grass has too big variations in size and color, considering it's a lawn. You need to go to "Scalling & Orientation" and put "maximum size variation" smaller. Regarding color, it's more difficult than it seems. Chipp Walters had a good tutorial on this. I don't have the right link now (nor the time to find it) but go to www.altuit.com and do a search.

5- Chipp Walters again has a nice pack, called TerraPak, which has a very nice fake grass. It looks good on distant shots but I wouldn't recommend it for close-ups.

6- You have a 3rd alternative, in addition to procedural and eco grass. You can have a bitmap. You can texture the ground (or a terrain) with a photo of real lawn. You have to be careful with tiling, so probably the best results can be achieved by mixing bitmap with procedural on the same material, using a noise or fractal function.

If I think of more stuff to add, I'll do it later.

Happy Vueing! :-)

thanks for the first feedback. i wanted to buy something off cornucopia but found that i need to login with my office account ... so that has to wait until i get my data from the office :) then i bought the terrapak (was on my radar for some time, now i had the excuse to actually do it ... waiting for the download link though). so in the meantime i am trying to figure out how grass is defined.

i placed one single patch of grass and had a look at the material settings.

then i fired up the gimp and created a blue to yellow gradient as color map which resulted in this.

i chose the extreme colors just to easily see where they go ...

and then finally i tried to change the shape of the grass blades and found its controlled by the transparency map (again created something with gimp leading to this).

so with this i can start finetuning color and shape of a single patch of grass ...

will keep you updated on my endavour in growing vue grass :)

Don't forget that when you use this as a VEG in an eco, color variations will be automatically added, that are not easy to control. If you convert this to VOB and use it in an eco, you can control color variations but then you don't have the shape variations that SolidGrowth introduces in VEGs.
One way to fake these shape variations is to save as VOB a few different instances of the plant, with different shapes, apply the same colors to all the instances, and then use these in an eco. This way you have some shape variation and complete color control.

after trying to create more reasonable color and shape i end up with this so far:

i used a dark to light green gradient for color and found that with the shape i need to mimic single blades and space between them to get a better look.

and terrakpak just arrived so i will go start to unpack and see what i have got there :-)

If the grass patch fits your needs, go ahead and use it, but I agree with Rutra, I think it looks absolutely awful, lol!
If you want to go for reall grass everywhere, be aware that you will need many instances, probably in the millions range, and this will take a lot of time to render.
Vue7 offers to dynamically populate ecosystems, so they only show in the camera's fov, which would save resources.
For longer shots, fake it! It will be a lot faster, and if the shots are animated, won't need as much flicker reduction. I found that the new Grass variation material looks absolutely stunning, provided you add some bump to it based on the colour production function.

for longer distance the material solution will be sufficient but for the foreground it would be nice to at least see the blades of grass where they border on a wall or similar.

so part of the "perfect way" is to balance the amount of eco grass vs material grass.

i find the vue eco grass isnt all bad. to me it resembles grass found out in nature, on uneven terrain and with the color maybe pointing to a little dryness. but i agree for nice lawn grass it wont do unless i find a way to make it look like i would like to :)

Attached Link: Stones and Groundcover

This is a quick render using it with displacement.

Looks really good, Gill.

thanks for the info, Gill. have to do some more shopping tomorrow :)

i tried to apply my understanding so far and started producing little grassland parts.

first i reduced the randomness in the plant settings.

then i unchecked "force regular placment" in material distribution

and finally i reduced flexiblilty (again in plant settings) and changed the sun a bit

so compared to vue's own grass i am quite happy with this so far ...

Two hints for variety in ecosystems: in the Scaling and Orientation tab...

...first check the rotation section. I don't know why, but it is fixed to 120 degrees: push it to 180, allowing Vue to select any angle (and not just a 240 degree arc).

..second check the Maximum size variation section: push the slider towards the non-uniform  side and in the above edits put something like e.g. 2 2 2. Plants become more varied (e.g. a forest is no more a robot-like mass for similar trees, but you have plants of different ages and therefore sizes).

Bye!!!

You could also try using the 'Dry  Weeds' plant with a grass material instead.  I prefer that for better looking grasses ( as used in my updated EcoGrass ).....shameless plug :lol:

It really depends on what type of grass/lawn look you're after and what distance you're rendering at.  Here's a few examples.  If you're going to use EcoGrass, you should get Linda's Lush Grass and Lush High Grasses over at C3D.  The basic Vue grass plant blows.  Also, on the EcoGrass, you should use some sort of procedural or texture map base for the ground plane under the eco.

again thanks for all the tips and feedback. today i got the stones and groundcover and will play around with that ...

i rendered a building we are developing with vue's rock and grass material and from this distant it looks ok i think (esp considering its a kindergarten where the grass is not green everywhere :)

(image is copyright 2009 LukasLang Building Technologies)

the grassroof needs to be worked on. looks too fluffy. i used the vue grass material scaled down at 0.5 ...

the white background is on purpose for now as i have no idea what to make there (street, fence ....)

The grass looks too smooth for me. The low frequency variations seem fine but the high frequency ones (i.e, the details) seem poor to me. Maybe you can mix a finer noise and increase the bump (or displacement, if you have enough RAM for that).