Hi all!  

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!!!

Question:   I am trying to make some landscapes.  But, I am having trouble adding grass and rocks!  In Bryce, rocks are made at the click of a button, but in Carrara?   

Any EASY grass and rocks?

Thanks!

Kevin

In Carrara you need to model them... or export some mesh from Bryce.

One way to make quick and easy rocks and boulders is to insert a sphere into your scene, then apply one of the Rocks and Stone category shaders from the browser. After you've done that,  open up the shader in the shader room and click on the displacement tab. Once there make sure Enable Displacement is checked, then click on the Wizard button and select Noise. Viola! Instant boulder. Now you can scale the different axis, make 'em smaller or larger, rotate and tilt 'em. They can even be added to a surface replicator for mass quantities. 

 Wow!  Thanks for the tip, 50parsecs...  Have to change my way of thinking a little...  Stuck on Bryce..

And, GKDantas, thanks for your link!

Kevin

You're also going to want to read up on the part about the surface replicator in the manual. If you're into landscapes it can do some neat things. The hair generator can also make grass in a pinch, but it may be a bit more calculation expensive than some other ways of doing things.

You're welcome GreenHawke. I started in Bryce too and still use it. Here's another neat trick for using displacement in a landscape. Find a picture of a rugged rock face, or cliff,( the ones I used here are from cgtextures.com) and open it into an image editor and make a copy to go with the original pic. Convert the copy into grayscale and apply a little gaussian blur. Open Carrara and insert a sphere. I generally stretch the sphere on the Z axis also.      Open the color tab of your shader and scroll down and select texture. Add the color picture to your shader. The preview pic doesn't look like much at this point.

Now, click on the displacement tab and add the grayscale pic here. The preview pic should look a lot craggier now.

This is a good technique for adding quick rock pinnacles or seastacks to a scene. You can stack spheres and they blend into each other. If I do this I usually rotate one about 90-180 degrees so the texture doesn't obviously repeat. The other nice thing about this trick is that the "stacks" render really fast too. Have fun. Time for someone else to chime in here as far as the Grass question.

Good tip 50parsecs! For grass, sinc eyou will not see it close, the good thing is to use the Fur system from Carrara that work pretty well and can be animated too.

Thank you Marcelo.

 Thanks for the great tips 50parsecs!

Another way to make simple stones meshes that are similar to Bryce stones and can be a little more varied in shape is to use the Organic construction method in the Vertex Modeller:  

Insert Vertex Object, using polyline tool draw an irregularly shaped polygon with 5 or 6 vertices, then fill the polygon ("cmnd/crtl F" or menu Model>Fill Polygon).  Then hit menu Construct>Organic and you'll get a low poly mesh stone.  From the Properties tray, apply Subdivision Smoothing to taste.  

50parsecs' sphere-based stones are probably better for many purposes (easier, lighter on resources), but Organic stones can be handy when you want stones with more "lumpy" shapes.  The stone in the pic came from a 6 point polyline, and ended up with 30 polygons and 45 vertices.  

Quote -  Thanks for the great tips 50parsecs!

Another way to make simple stones meshes that are similar to Bryce stones and can be a little more varied in shape is to use the Organic construction method in the Vertex Modeller:  

Insert Vertex Object, using polyline tool draw an irregularly shaped polygon with 5 or 6 vertices, then fill the polygon ("cmnd/crtl F" or menu Model>Fill Polygon).  Then hit menu Construct>Organic and you'll get a low poly mesh stone.  From the Properties tray, apply Subdivision Smoothing to taste.  

50parsecs' sphere-based stones are probably better for many purposes (easier, lighter on resources), but Organic stones can be handy when you want stones with more "lumpy" shapes.  The stone in the pic came from a 6 point polyline, and ended up with 30 polygons and 45 vertices.  

Thanks very much!  I never fail to be amazed at the abilities of Carrara!

Kevin

That's a great tip Autelius, and one I'll have to try! I've made a lot of boulders and rock formations using Wings, but I'm just now getting used to Carrara's vertex and spline modelers. OK, here's one last one from me using a shader with displacement on an obj. mesh from Wings as a base. I was kind of tickled with the way this shader turned out.

I call it Coral Reef.