Creating grass / trees / greenery in C4D R 9.1 Studio Bundle…

[Brian Jones]

depending on the distance to the greenery there are many ways. A tree can be just a flat plane with a tree image with an alpha channel if it’s far enough from the camera. Assuming you want 3D stuff it can be built by hand (time) or by plugin (money)

For grass I would use Maxon’s Hair, Renato’s Fast & Fur, StormTracer, or the free HairDepartment

for plants/trees either Katachi’s DPIT Nature Spirit or XFrog

There are also many ways between the by-hand and dedicated plugin methods as well…

[Joey Morelli]

Hey Brian…thanx for the awesome replies. I am looking to build 3D grass (a golf green) and 3d trees (lining a golf fairway) and animate a camera throughout. What would be the best solutions for this? Free (you mentioned one plug-in) is good, if it renders realistically (this piece I am work will air nationally), but REALISM is the key.

Thank you, Brian – for taking the time 🙂

– Joey

[Brian Jones]

sounds like you are wading in to a major learning curve. Others here who do that sort of work all the time will know far more than me but I do know that too much realism in trees and greenery (or anything complex) can easily get into unworkable numbers of polys if you don’t fake the stuff you can get away with and put realism only where needed. *Especially* with animations. Textures can do wonders if the camera doesn’t get too close to tell.

[Joey Morelli]

I am not worried about the learning curve…I’m a quick study 😉 I also know about LOD (level of detail) and faking it with textures. I can’t use that for this particular 5 second scene. It is a camera fly (low angle – almost on the grass) of a golf tee box partially surrounded by trees / shrubs. The camera rotates around the golfball teed up with our logo on it and as the camera eases into a stop, a driver comes in and smacks the ball off the tee – tee spinning & flying straight up out of frame.

I thought about a bump or displacement map for the grass…but I won’t get blades of grass from that (like Paint Effects in Maya). Thanx for trying.

Anyone else have any GRASS / TREE / SHRUBBERY experience? PLEASE chime in…I would love to hear how it can be accomplished in C4D (plug-ins / modules / whatever).

[Samir Kharchi]

Well, I can only speak for DPIT as I am the developer of it. 🙂

You can create any tree type with it, it offers absolute freedom in tree creation. The growth of a tree can easily be accomplished too. It can also generate polygonal grass very easily. And also animating the grass is very easily accomplished via a deformer object.

Of course it has lots of more possibilities. The best way to find out is to look at the website and download the demo and see if it fits your needs. 🙂

Here is the link: http://www.dpit2.de

[Joey Morelli]

Thanx for posting Katachi. A bit too pricey for me @ $350.

[Brian Jones]

well, go to https://www.c4dcafe.com/ and get Hair Department Monster Edition (the last and best version) and try that for grass for starters.

[Joey Morelli]

Brian,

Hair Department Monster Edition is EXACTLY what I was looking for to make grass…it’s AWESOME & works GREAT on my Quad / OS 10.4.5 / C4D R9.102 !!! The Tree modules / plug-ins are on the expensive side so I am gonna have to figure something else out.

Thank you so much for your time!!! PERFECT!

– Joey