Creating a field of wheat in MAX...

[BrandonD]

You could do quite a bit by just mapping wheat textures onto planar objects that you animated with a Bend Modifier. Then maybe scatter it, making instances within a bounding area.

Just an idea.

[phil]

theere used to be a plugin for this. i think it was called Druid, don't know if it still exists but i'd say it does.
Otherwise there is the 'scatter 1 blade of wheat with a bend on it' option and then offset the animation. The only problem with this method is that you don't get nice big clumps of wheat moving together like in real life.

head on over to scriptspot.com too and have a look for a bend script that someone wrote to try and tackle this problem.

shen's idea of the mapped planes would be good too, especially for the background wheat, if you had actual mesh blades in the foreground.

cheers
phil

[Martijn Wijmer]

Make grass plug-in by Shawn Lewis (http://www.3idee.nl/make_grass.htm)
Also in conjuction with this plugin (Blow grass) (http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/maxscript.cfm) it's very easy to animate.

[Shen]

thanks very much for all your help. I'll try out those plug-ins, and use combustion and make 2d animated planes as suggested... its gonna be sweet! Thanks again!

[Nahaz]

I've recently done something similar. I suggest using Parray instead of scripts to place instances over a surface, it's so much faster.

You can animate the original source mesh, then offset the animation within the particle system. Works beautifully.

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