Reply To: Collab2021-WIP- spikeyxxx
Hey @spikeyxxx, really great work here! Nice investigation to find a good method. I’m copy/pasting this from @rstich ‘s thread because my feedback for both of you is exactly the same. You guys can decide if you want to try your hand at it individually or as a team.
In order for this to look crazy good and be performant, we’re going to need three things:
- A base layer of particle hair grass, which renders blazing fast and can have different settings for viewport and rendering. This layer should be fairly dense
- A secondary layer of taller grass clumps, made of mesh grass strips arranged into nice bunches. There should be at least 9 unique models of clumps or else it will look pretty obviously repeated. These could be scattered with geometry nodes or as a particles system – performance seems to be similar.
- A stylized shader that works for the ground, the mesh grass, and the particle grass all at the same time to tie them all together. We can’t do the emission thing because we really need those shadows. We can, however, turn off shadow casting for the material and point the normals straight up in the z direction to get a pretty neat stylized effect.
Grass is one of those things that seems simple but actually takes quite a bit of work to get right, but I have faith that you guys can nail it! Hopefully this older course can help you with the particle hair shapes and what I mean by grass clumps: Creating Grass in Blender – CG Cookie
Full points for this week. Keep up the good work!