The Secret to Creating Realistic Grass

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

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!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! To stay informed on more tutorials released in the future, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Tags: advanced, video

177 Responses to “The Secret to Creating Realistic Grass”

iamcreasy

29. Jun, 2009

cooool…..thanks a lot!
Tobey

29. Jun, 2009

Awesome !!! Been waiting for a tut like this one for long.

T-H-A-N-K-S
Konrad Haenel

01. Jul, 2009

Here’s a quick thing I found out while animating the grass:

I wanted a very gentle and slow breeze. As texture-size is limited to 2.0 I needed a way to scale the texture further up. To achive this one must scale the physics-empty down.

I’m at a loss to explain why this works, but it does.

PS: great tutorial, it helped A LOT!
Daniel

02. Jul, 2009

I’ve got a new laptop (with vista, sorry), and even though it’s brand new the RAM (or CPU, I’m pretty sure it’s ram though) was not enough to render this without freezing for about 5 mins, so what I did is turned down the total amount to about 500 and and increased the children amount to about 1200. Still looks pretty decent, the grass looks a bit less realistic, but I think this is a much better setting for lower power computers, (considering I was working on an old ME before this, I can appreciate advice like this).
Antonio

08. Jul, 2009

Hi !

I’m really.. REALLY new to blender… (i started to use it about a month ago… ) and even thou it took me about a day (not 30 min) to complete this project, i’m very happy with the results…

here is the final rendered image: http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/2759/zacate.jpg

btw… i didn’t add any flowers as you may see, cause i was kinda tired with the project (lol)

i did have a huge problem with the spot lamps… in the end i had to deselect “buf.shadow” i don’t know why but that was the problem cause when selected, it was pitch dark… !

Thanks for the tutorial… ! If i was able to do it, it means that’s really easy to understand u cause i’m just beginning to understand how blender works… however i think this program will be really useful for me… since i’m an industrial design student !

P.S. I looove the clouds and sky that u created for the other tutorial about the trees… it would be amazing if u had the time to post a tutorial about that… if is not too hard lol… !
Daniel

08. Jul, 2009

That’s fantastic Antonio, I hope you continue working on blender. I will have to say you didn’t miss out on much by not including flower, I don’t think flowers or the high grass really adds very much to the scene. Good luck blending
Ashad

16. Jul, 2009

Hi
Andrew Price.
Thanks for your great work.Here is my rendered image

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2532/3725968845_ae01b91e43.jpg?v=0
Andrew Price

17. Jul, 2009

That’s amazing Ashad! I honestly thought you were linking to a reference image off flickr.

It is truly is stunning. You certainly have an eye for colours and composition

Keep up the hard work!
Ashad

18. Jul, 2009

I’m really surprised after reading your comments.
It’s a great inspiration for me.
Thanks a lot.
Yukasz

04. Aug, 2009

Wanna show mine too

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/7972/greengrasscarpet1440.jpg

P.S. Thx for the great tut, hope we get more froom you in the future. Just one question: why use spotlights? I’ve got my with 2 sun lights…
SebastianErler

04. Aug, 2009

Thanks a lot for this fantastic tutorial!
Willem

07. Aug, 2009

Great tutorial Andrew

Thanks for sharing. Now i just need to figure out how to render it in VRay
CJ

18. Aug, 2009

Awesome tutorial! I just need some help with one minor problem that I have; I run on Vista, with 2.49, and I did pretty much everything you said to do in the video (minus the tall grass and flowers), and every time I go to render, the program crashes!

Can someone please help me with this? Otherwise i’ll never be able to look at real grass the same way again without cursing under my breath! I don’t care how long it ends up taking to render, I just want to get a still!
Antonio

18. Aug, 2009

@ CJ

I also run Vista with 2.49 and the program didn’t crash rendering that particular scene… even with tall grass added…

Maybe there’s something wrong with the graphics card config. Another problem might be unsufficient RAM memory or processing horsepower…

If u listed ur computer specs maybe we could find out what’s wrong… also give us ur phyton version… and if the sistem is 32 or 64 bits… XD
CJ

19. Aug, 2009

@Antonio:

Hmm…well, I have an Intel Pentium Graphics card, I run on the 32-bit system, and I have 1.00 GB of RAM. Maybe that helps?

Also, I think it would be better if we corespond over email, since I don’t wanna hog up the comments with crap about my computer that nobody cares about, lol XD

here’s my email:

goldenacorn93@gmail.com
josh

20. Aug, 2009

I know that you mentioned that you would say how you could animate the grass. Could you help me out.
Rasmus

22. Aug, 2009

Thanks for an awesome tutorial. I feel like a pro when watching the result, which is now my background

At first blender seemed to be crashing when the rendering began but I found out that if I just didn´t try and disturb it by clicking on the black screens they would return to normal together with the final render results.

Anyway here´s one of my renders.
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5006/grass20001.png
recalledBrain

25. Aug, 2009

Andrew,

Thank you! That’s a really, really nice tutorial! The colorband texture is a lesson by itself!

I worked out my own, but didn’t work out the 2nd and 3rd particle systems yet.

I did, however, make a couple of experimental mods:

I added a texture to the sun lamp to give a dappled appearance fitting the scattered clouds in the background.

I set the sky lamp to a light blue, with very low energy (~0.5) and got better results in the “shaded” areas, but I’m betting my dark blue light also just needed tweaking.

I went ahead and used a brown base surface. By setting it’s alpha to ~0.9, it seemed to improve the look of it quite a bit.

Still needs work, especially in my overall lighting, but here’s a render:

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/1579/newgrass.jpg

Cheers!
Steven Bailey

02. Sep, 2009

Great tutorial. However, after completing it step by step up to the first render, I find that the grass isn’t affected by the light at all. As a result, nothing is rendered but the black silhouette of the strands against the backdrop. Is there a setting I may have fiddled with that would prevent the grass from being affected by the light?

~Steven
Antonio

03. Sep, 2009

@Steven Bailey

I had the same problem with the lights… in my case i had to deselect “buf.shadow” from the light settings (under the Shadow and Spot tab).

Hope it works !
Azazeo

24. Sep, 2009

Very good tutorial! Thank you!
I’ve got: http://azainamart.blogspot.com/2009/09/1.html
Sixthlaw

28. Sep, 2009

Hey i have a Problem. Ive recently bought a new computer specifically for blender and number crunching. A quad core, running on a MA790fXT-UDP5P motherboard, amd’s black edition cpu, and 4 gb of ddr3 ram. and this takes litteraly five minutes before it BEGINS to render. Is blender using all my computers capabilitys? is it windows 7? some help would be VERY much appreciated!:D
Yann

24. Oct, 2009

Thank you very much Andrew!
It’s been very very helpfull !

Yann (FR)
KC

30. Oct, 2009

Thanks Andrew for your tutorial, great for beginners like me and very easy to follow. I need help with figuring out why it turned out this way. Any advice, very welcome!
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/2778/longgrass0001.jpg
Jotasolano

30. Oct, 2009

@ KC

Your render looks almost artistic!!… Rather than figuring out what “went wrong”, maybe we could find out what settings you used to make it look like that…

Having said that, I’ve no idea why it turned out like that.
KC

01. Nov, 2009

Thanks Jotasolano for your comments
i like the woodcutish appearance. maybe i’ll keep this settings as a template for an animation.
TimbukFive

22. Nov, 2009

Hey

thanks a lot for this great tutorial. Here is my shot and it looks like very realistic i guess ..mybe a bit color correction and its fininshed

best regards
TimbukFive

22. Nov, 2009

forgot to post the shot lol :S

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7798/grasc.jpg
Andrew Price

24. Nov, 2009

@TimbukFive
Fantastic mate! I’m always amazed at the results you guys post. But I’m slightly miffed when yours looks better than mine!
Eric Nondahl

28. Nov, 2009

Great tutorial! I went for a western look after getting the basic:

http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/5987/render1h.jpg

Thanks!
Eric Nondahl

28. Nov, 2009

Added some defocus and it’s a lot better:

http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/310/render3g.jpg
Lorne

20. Feb, 2010

Thanks for this great tutorial Andrew. I ran into a couple of problems as I am doing this in 2.5 and some of the settings are a little different, but my biggest problem is the render times.

It took 5 -20 minutes to render 1 frame with 12 GB of ram.

Is there any way to create grass in Blender that renders faster? I am willing to tradeoff some of the realism for faster render times. Is it possible to render grass faster maybe using another method? Just curious.

Thanks
Andrew Price

21. Feb, 2010

@Lorne
I’m quite surprised to hear of your rendertimes. Just last night I created grass in 2.5 and it rendered super fast! Could you upload your .blend so I can see it?

You can upload it to: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/
Fred

21. Feb, 2010

Great tutorial dude! Need more of these…There just so much to learn and not enough instructional videos. ha. Everything looks great except my flowers are showing up in the camera view but not when I render. When I render they’re not there? any idea as to what’s happening?
Chris

21. Feb, 2010

Great tutorial. Here is an animation I did using the tutorial, I even rendered it to my iPod using your other tutorial.
Chris

21. Feb, 2010

Forgot the link, sorry about that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMEnbosFo90
Maria

22. Feb, 2010

Thanks, I made some dunes

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DtkRYe4Iu1I/S4Ivrqdh7GI/AAAAAAAACNQ/LXCjLWkyg8U/s1600-h/06grass-dunes4-800.jpg
Riptyde

26. Feb, 2010

Andrew…
I’m trying this tutorial on 2.5 after going through it in 2.49. and I’m missing something. Any chance you’d be welling to share your 2.5 version that you just did (noted in an earlier post on the 21st). I’d like to compare what I’ve been doing.

The issue I’m dealing with is in either the material or texture.

Thanks

Rip
grumpyestonian

27. Feb, 2010

Nice tutorial. Everything’s coming out great except the flowers. For some reason, they don’t appear in the grass. They’re all floating randomly in air. As far as I can tell, the only way in which I’ve deviated from the tutorial is only putting one version of the flower in the group. Also, I’m getting an odd hazy area in the foreground corner- a lightening in the shadows. Any idea what is causing either of these phenomena?
Marc Jacobs

14. Mar, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/tennisgolfrunning/4434214700/]
Marc Jacobs

14. Mar, 2010

Dear Andy, if you look closely at my previous post you’ll notice that are patches where the grass failed to render. what could possibly be the cause of this?

Thanks again,

Marc
Connor

14. Mar, 2010

Slight malfunction while making this, instead of the texture we created for the grass going on each strand, it seems to have taken that texture, and lay it on top of the entire this, so its like a giant rainbow. Any help would be appreciated.
Connor

14. Mar, 2010

http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=2173 is the link to the .blend
LuciferCorsoF

15. Mar, 2010

Thanks a lot great tutorial helped me a LOT!!! =D

I done this
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/5858/0002pt.jpg
Connor

15. Mar, 2010

Ok, i fixed it. I’m not sure if you mentioned it, you probably did but i went to “shading”, “material buttons”, “map input” and selected “Strand”
Aiden

16. Mar, 2010

Hey, i have a really annoying problem :@ when i go to render the image it ALWAYS shows me the picture with the blue background and the shape of the mesh but just black! WHERE is the texture i added to it? i have the lights over it, i can see it in the 3d view :@ so whats wrong?
Jeremy

16. Mar, 2010

Hello Mr. Price,
My name is Jeremy Hack, I am a student at ITT Technical Institute majoring in Visual Communication. I have used blender for about two weeks now, and I was wanting to know if you could provide me with some help regarding my final rendering. Below you will find two seperate renders of the same scene; on of which is night time, the other is sunset. I have noticed that my grass looks rather lumpy and less random than yours, and I’m not sure what I missed? I apologize for the awful looking twigs on the tree, I made my twig bounding boxes too large before I executed the script, I should have made more secondary branches.

http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/5364/treevalleyrender.jpg

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/7678/nightrender.jpg
Connor

16. Mar, 2010

@ Jeremy Hack
Did you make it in blender 2.5 or upload it to blender 2.5? Because i made mine in 2.4.9 then opened it in 2.5 and it appeared like that, so that may be your issue.
Jeremy

16. Mar, 2010

@ Connor,
Thank you for the swift reply. I constructed the scene in v. 2.49 and rendered it with 2.49 as well. Im only experementing with the 2.5 interface at this time. Do you know of anything else that may be causing this? Thank you for your help, and once again I appreciate the quick reply.
Connor

16. Mar, 2010

@ Jeremy Hack
If you upload it to this link http://pasteall.org/blend/ ill take a look at it then guide you through it if i find anything wrong