The Secret to Creating Realistic Grass in Blender | Blender Tutorials

The Secret to Creating Realistic Grass

Posted on 22. May, 2009 by Andrew Price in Tutorials

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Discover dozens of tips and tricks to push your outdoor scene over the edge!

This 22-minute video tutorial will teach you how to:

Control particle strands
Save on render times by using child particles
Evenly distribute flowers across a plane
Effectively use the colorband feature
Make a field of uniform strands appear ‘lumpy’

The sky texture I will be using in this tutorial is from CG-Textures.com and can be obtained from here.

Ready? Let’s begin…

Bonus Tip: How to Animate the Grass!

Add a new texture to your grass plane. Name it ‘Wind’ and select Marble from the drop down list. Apply the following settings:

marble-settings

Switch to the Shading panel (F5) and make sure the Wind texture is turned off.

material-settings

The reason for this is because the plane is not actually what will create the wind. We are merely using it’s texture slots so we can edit it if we need to later.

Add an empty at one end of your grass plane and insert a keyframe by pressing i and selecting Loc

keyframe

Change the frame number to 200 and move the empty to the other end of your plane. Add another keyframe.

If you hit Alt+A, the empty should move to other side of your plane.

With the Empty still selected, go to the Object panel (F7) and select the Physics button. In the fields panel, apply the following settings:

field1

This will convert the texture we applied to the plane, into a wind force. The empty acts as a brush, moving the wind through the particles and causing them to react.

Play with the texture settings until you find something you like. If you want faster or slower wind, adjust the distance that the empty moves. Shorter distances make for gentler breezes, whereas greater distances make for gale force winds. Have fun!

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Tags: advanced, video

114 Responses to “The Secret to Creating Realistic Grass”

Connor

17. Mar, 2010

once you upload it just post a link to it and it will send an email to me with it.
Jeremy

18. Mar, 2010

@Connor:

http://pasteall.org/blend/2226

Thank you for your help, it is greatly appreciated.
Connor

18. Mar, 2010

Ok, i found several issues so far, i don’t think 2 of them are making a problem but it might help to have

the issues are in the “object” section of the plane inside “particle buttons”
1. under “particle system” select the box that says “random”.
2. under “particle system” select the box that says “even”.
3. under “children” change “Rough2″ to have the number. “0.200″.
4. under “children” change “size1″ to 0 and set “size2″ to 0.520
5. under “children” change “rough1″ to 0 and change “rough2″ to 0.200
thats all i have found so far, it makes it look much nicer. I’ll keep looking.
Connor

18. Mar, 2010

sorry, ignore step 3 or ignore the second part of step 5
Connor

18. Mar, 2010

I only found 1 other but i have some recommendations too.
Issue: Object:Particle Buttons:Extras: push the “Children” button to activate it.
Recommendations:
1. The planes around it that are creating a wall are nice, but you can upload an image for a render background too, it depends on how you want it. Both are nice.
2. The grass has a nice color to go with the scene because of the lights, but you can also use the colorband option that is later on in the tutorial to add varied colors with alpha. But just fix the grass and it will look nice anyway!
rudm

19. Mar, 2010

How do you make points in colorband? So fast and without any explanation at all – I can’t follow, and when I try to create point following your video step-by-step, they absolutely not like in tutorial! So, what is the secret? Is there anyone who can make grass following your tutorial?
LuciferCorsoF

19. Mar, 2010

with ctrl + left click and yes i followed tutorial perfectly everything is explained…

with this tutorial i made this:
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/5858/0002pt.jpg

and again great tutorial and THANKS AGAIN!!!
rudm

19. Mar, 2010

I knew there was some tip! Thanks, I’ll try with ctrl

The sky and moon is beautiful! But grass doesn’t looks good to me, sorry.
LuciferCorsoF

19. Mar, 2010

well i used bluish color becouse of a sky light if you meen that? or the grass on bottom of the picture looks little weird? it looks great to me becouse i use blender for less then 2 weeks so… =)
Nick

19. Mar, 2010

Why are my particles growing in the air?