Grassy field (how too?)

#1

Well my boss, bought this software a plopped it in my lap today, so now I am expected to crank out some realistic stills. First off a grassy field like seen here. http://www.uniden.com/messenger/fullpage.html

Been trolling this forum and eon’s site and cant really find anything to get me a jump start on the program. I am thinking I will invest in the AsileFX training video. But before I do, is there any freebies out there? But for now I am going through it with trial and error. Cant seem to get a nice rolling style hills set up. Any advice is appreciated. Oh yeah it is Vue Infinite. And I use LW as a companion app. BUt I would liek to render it all in VI if possible.

On a side note. Can VUE render wireframes? Or wireframes on top of the raster image?

#2

Nice rolling hills - I usually build the terrain from scratch in the terrain editor using airbrush style, a big brush, softness and flow set to about ‘70’.

To get grass like the photo, the absolute best grass I’ve found is Linda’s Lush grass for sale at Cornucopia 3D store. It is created as a Vue plant which makes beautiful ecosystems and handles the millions of polygons that grass creates.

You will need to log into Cornucopia3D using the same login as the registration login used at the e-on site. Cornucopia is an e-on sponsored site.

www.cornucopia3d.com

Hope this helps

Lin

#3

Personally, for something like the rolling grassy hills, I wouldn’t even use Vue, I’d just use Sas.
Ten times easier and faster for something like simple grass.

Otherwize, I’d just use a grey scale map and have it fade from white to black,
white being in the foreground and black in the background (farther away)
and then use that as your density and your scale.
This will let you only have the grass needed for as far as you can actually
see the grass without having to kill your system with trillions of polies
that go off into the distance that you can’t see anyway.

OT, sadly, I am still working on my contest scene and
it’s already past 2am after midnight of the 15th deadline.
Rats too, cuz it’s starting to look sort of good finally LOL

Oh well, I’m still going to finish it and have fun anyway, I just don’t
get to enter it into anything to WIN anything, like Vue6 like I wanted soooo badly :frowning:

…md :slight_smile:

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#4

Hi,

Whats sas?

Thanks
Jon

#5

I agree with Lin. The best way to do this is creat the terrain you want in the editor and then populate an ecosystem made up with Linda’s Lush grass. If you can’t purchase that, there are grassy terrains you can use in ecosystems that come with Vue. It’s actually pretty simple and quick to render.

To the best of my knowledge, Vue does not render wireframes. I can test tonight when I’m home and repost here.

#6

Yeah, the Lush Grass is a good one, I bought that particular grass myself too.

As for what is Sas, there is Sas Full version that cost ya, but since you have LW
there is also Sas Lite that comes with LW already, so you don’t need to spend any money.

Check out my Sas Lite Grass Tutorial at my web site, if you want to see a sample
of what could be done for a slightly more advanced setup of the grass, compared to
the default Sas Lite style of grass that they should have a sample scene of with LW.

Just check out my link bellow and look under the Turorials section to find it.

Otherwize, try out the method I mentioned above in my other reply, on how to get a
good grass without completely killing your system, which everyone here keeps forgetting
to let you know about, which is, that IF you DO use the Lush Grass, or any other grass
from Vue, to cover mountains and mountains with grass, such as those rolling hills that
were in that sample image you showed us, that you will most likely be getting the famous
message that says, "you won’t have enough memory to do the procedure if you proceed.
But, I could be wrong, since I haven’t actually tested your particular scene out.
But, I’ve tried in the past to add small sized items, that needed to cover terrains
and at that small scale, they have always caused the program to give me that message.

…md :slight_smile:

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#7

Thanks for the responses I will look into Sasquatch. I actually have a license for it and never installed it. I wont be able to buy anything from cornucopia until me boss gets back in town. He has all the reg info, I think I need. Never had a software that doesnt let you buy materials unless you are registered.

Unless someone will make the purchase for me, or sell me their lush grass. I did buy Eco-Wear from Monsoon, at the 3dcommune site.

Oh an dI bought some of AsileFX training for VI and it is great, highly recommended.

#8

Ok now i dont understand. why must he buy some add on to make grass. isnt that what Vue should do on its own. im a bit ??? on this . i mean i understanding buying 3d mods you rather not wast time building but are you telling me to push Vue i need to buy more add-ons.

#9

Actually yea, the thing is it seems you cannot make certain items on your own to be plugged into Vue. So to expand you buy these relatively inexpensive add-ons. But what sucks is your product has to be registered. But I can see why they do it. I didnt see a grass eco-system or objects in my install so it seems you do have to buy grass. But I am new and some of it could be my ignorance. But at cornucopia3d they said the same.

#10

Actually there are several grass materials that you can use with or without an eco system that come with V5i. click on your object, go up to the material ball and right click and choose “add material” browse through terrains and ecosystems. :wink:

#11

OK, I’ve been doing some test, just to see for myself what the scoop is.
First off, it appears they used nothing BUT Sas (or something like Sas)
to make that sample that you have a link to.

To check this and varify why I think this way, here are some things to examine in that image.

First off, it’s a mirrored image, so we can get that part out of the way right now.
You can “easily” see in the middle where they attempted to “blur” the
mirrored image together better, though not very well.
No offence meant to who ever made it though :slight_smile:
Sooo…
To help cover things, it looks like they could of done either one of these two things.

The background grass, may just be a texture and nothing more, though it IS possible
that they wasted their time and actually made grass go off into the distance, though
there seems to be no real need for that, as you can see in the image there,
that the actual blades of grass only go so far and then almost all of
a sudden stop at about a third of the way up the image.
This is pretty clear to see.
Then, to help cover more, they rendered more Sas type grass in the forground to
cover the fact that all the rest of the grass is sooo perfectly straight and smooth.
And also probably help hide the fact that they mirrored the image and probably had
some bad matching up near the bottom of the image and thus the need to cover
the front with that “other” style of grass that you see at the base of the image.
None of the grass looks like it was done with real polygons though.

Anyway, here’s my two sample tests.
I would LOVE to see someone, “anyone” TRY and make a Vue scene with grass that
is as solid as that sample grass image that he needs to make his grass look similar to?
I tried and tried and tried last night to get Vue to “completely” cover the ground with
grass and I tried different grasses and I have them all, and none would make more then
a certain amount, which I think was around 10,000+ but I can’t recall the exact amount,
just that no matter what I set my settings to, I couldn’t go above that amount.

Using Sas however, you can make an endless amount of grass that
also covers the whole terrain and looks more like what you see in that image.
Which isn’t to say that it’s any good or better, just that that is what it
looks like they did for that image and how you “are able” to create
grass that “will” cover your terrain through out.

I purposely made the ground sand colored, so it could
be seen easily, if there were any patchy holes in the grass.
Oh yeah, and both are using the same exact terrain too :slight_smile:

Vue using three different grasses from the Lush Grasses Colection:

And LW using Sas Full, but Sas Lite would do about the same thing:

…md :slight_smile:

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#12

Mdunakin

Your lightwave grass looks pretty awesome and really close to what I am after. I too am having the problems with Vue and covering ther terrain with dense/green grass. I always get patchy, less than believeable renders. Granted I only spent this whole weekend playing with it, so I do have much more to learn. I would love to see any others take a crack at this in vue and see their results. Because I cannot seem to get anything to look right on this. Mdunakin, you think you could share a tut on how you did this in LW?

Thanks man

#13

I’d have to completely agree with m.d. - for realistic looking grass - SAS is definitely the way to go. We use SAS every day (7 days a week) for grass in our architectural renders and wouldn’t use anything else since it looks very realistic and is easy to set up. Hopefully we’ll see SAS2 before the end of the year…?

Megalodon

#14

I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.
I’m not going to be able to get back to any of this for a few days after that,
so tomorrow will be my best, earliest bet to get anything done.
I can however post up both sample scene files for you to check out and all.
But, I’ll see if I can put in some explinations to help out :slight_smile:

And yeah, I live on Sas and can’t see living without it!

I even figured out ways to make a Vue scene and THEN add in my Sas grass
to make the Vue scene look more realistic, since it’s pretty obvious that
you won’t be able to ever cover a terrain in Vue with grass.
Ummm… xTream would of course work better for this sort of thing.
Meaning, you could export your terrain into LW to use for the Sas,
and then use xTream to load the Vue scene in with.

Anyway, I’ll see what I can do tomorrow,it’s too late tonight… well, now it’s morning LOL

…md :slight_smile:

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#15

Well, once I woke up, I couldn’t get back to sleep.
Now I see it’s almost 5am and I’ve been playing Poser
and LW half the morning alredy since I woke up at midnight LOL

Anyway, here’s the LW part of the files, I’ll do the Vue part when I actually get up latr today :wink:
This time I really am going to go back to sleep,… I hope LOL

http://www.md-arts.com/lw/Grassy_Hill_Terrain_LW_Sas_01.zip

Be sure to examine my settings in Sas and pay close attention to Styling and Clumping and Combing.
These are major deals for keeping the grass looking clean.
Of course, if it’s too smooth and clean, then tweak these settings away.

See ya laters when I wake up and I hope this sample scene will help you out some.
Oh yeah, one other main note before I cut out.
be sure! to Save out the Sas settings from the first main window in Sas Full.
Cuz this way you can load that back in for your own terrain object.
Keeping in mind that my grass is set to the size of my terrain and your’s may vary.

Enjoy!
…md :slight_smile:

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#16

Hi guys,
that SAS looks really neat. I tried to search for it, and couldn’t find the link. Is there version for 3DS Max, and what is the link to manufacturer.

Regards
Srdjan

#17

Mdunakin, dloading it now. Many many thanks. Shame Vue cannot do this. It is killer for rocks and terrains. Maybe with a little playing I could get something. Not giving up on Vue yet, but for this project dont think its happening.

Sasquatch is only available for Lightwave. Dont know of a close cousin for it in Max, but here is the link. This Fprime and G2 could be reasons to switch.

#18

Just looking at your scene file and it is excellent!, do have questions on how you lit your scene. If you get a chance could you expan on that and the environment used? Lighting and texturing is by far my weakest part of LW.

#19

Thanx and I’ll try.
For you, (and is what I generally do for myself when I first start on a new Sas scene) is,
I’d start with using the Option in the “other” Sas window that lets you set it to Preview or not.
(Sorry, can’t recall what the other Sas window is called, but I think you know what I mean LOL

From there you do a (probably 50%) rendering and this way you can open up the main
Sas window and when you go to check on your settings for things like Shading and Color,
you’ll be able to get a preview of what the real deal will end up looking like.
That’s how I did and do it most of the time.
The reason I bring this up of course, is because this ALL will affect your lighting in the scene.
Or better put, how the lighting will affect your Sas grass/fur/whatever.
Take note that settings like Ambient, Shadows, Tinting, Specular, Glossy
and of course, Diffuse, will all affect how your grass ends up looking in the scene.
They can be very touchy too, so try ONLY ONE setting each time to see how and what it affects and does.
Oh yeah, and I forgot, the Translucent settings can have drastically,
altering affects on your grass too, so, tread lightly when using these setting.

Tip: to keep the grass darker overall, but yet still have a sheen to it,
only set the Translucent for the Tip of the Sas and don’t mess with the other one.

Then set it back to what it just was and move on to the next setting listed above and repete this
process untill you have a pretty good idea of what each setting is doing to the way the Sas looks.

Then you can start mixing some combinations of each of these.
The whole time doing this still within the Sas window.
Once you are pretty happy, then do another test render while STILL in this preview mode.
If things look OK, then go ahead and set things back to full render mode.
Do a rendering and see if it’s about what you want and if nessisary, repete the process.

As for the lighting, I like to use the Spot lights with Shadow Maps because I have the
control I want from within Sas, since it could care less about other types of lights,
at least as far as the shadows go and all, as this is the only Light type
option you see in the other Sas panel.
Yes, normal lights will still work and I guess make shadows,
but not as good as with using the Spot lights.
I always use a pretty good rezolution for these too, like anywhere from 2000 to 4000.

Now, remember this too, that when you mess around with your lighting, ANY lighting
in the scene, don’t be supprised when you see your Sas grass completely change
and not look anything like what you thought it would or what you had earlier.

Hope this helps a little to get you started with which things really mattered in my grass? :slight_smile:

If you need more help, feel free to ask.

And as Megalodon uses this a lot, he may also have some extra tips to use this with your
Vue scenes, as I haven’t spent that much time or any for that matter, working with the two
programs combined, but I will be very shortly, as it will be needed in my upcoming scenes.

Have fun!

…md :slight_smile:

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#20

Great stuff, something for me to chew on. I really appreciate it.

Not totally giving up on Vue just yet. It just wasnt as turnkey as I heard and expected. But it is still a very cool program that I will be revisiting.

Cheers.