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Large scale grassy field
Is there a way to get a reasonable setup for this? I’ve used the culling options, distance clipping, and other various approaches, all fruitless. Grass seems to be very limited on how much you can have while still maintaining some efficiency. The field would be animated with turbulence as well so no faking with image planes and alphas.
Up till now I’ve just used hills and a camera position that only allows you to see sky beyond the hill to avoid having to have a distance-scape. Ideas would be very much appreciated.
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17 Replies
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What are you using for the grass? I would suggest using the Hair module.
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Yep, that’s what I’m using, but I have to use an insane hair count to get even close to desired results which still isn’t enough.
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Maybe C4D just isn’t good at something of that scale? Or I’d have to use alpha maps to define length, segment detail, and thickness so that the grass in the distance doesn’t require so much processing? Maybe some expresso for detail vs camera distance?
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There is probably some way to drive the hair material’s density with a gradient mapped to camera distance. I’d also use some environmental fog/haze to fade out the distant areas.
Another option would be to use MoGraph with render instances. This took a little better than 1 1/2 minutes to render on my machine: https://www.3danvil.com/tutorials/grass_instances.jpg
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That’s pretty good. The grass is tight and dense over a good span of ground. That’s what I need, do you think I can get a scene file from you on that so I can see exactly what you’re talking about? I’ve tried using off-screen culling and it didn’t help at all. I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out how to make it more feasible to add more grass.
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I was using the Surfacespread plugin in the prior example but I’ve done up a quick sample file using MoGraph instead. A couple things to note:
* I’m using a display tag to reduce the clones in the viewport and to display them as wire boxes;
* I used a grass patch object as a clone instead of cloning a single blade of grass; Cinema does better with fewer high poly objects vs. multitudes of low poly objects;
* I have “raytrace only” turned on in the render>AA settings. This is considerably faster than the default Hybrid setting when using render instances of this sort;
* I have “render instances” turned on in the Cloner>Object tab; you would quickly run out of memory if you tried to render this without render instances.
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Can’t thank you enough for the help and time. I actually have a few projects at work that need the grassy field as well as some freelance stuff that needs large amounts of landscape as well. I’ll check the file out now. Again, thanks!
-CP
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I don’t know that I’m getting the same results as you, I posted what I rendered from you (with an error about degamma plugin) because this looks quite a bit different than your last render post. Although the render time for this at 1600×1200 was only 1 minute for a frame, the ground looks like a noisy bump up close with no blades?
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Woops, that sure doesn’t look right. I would guess the problem is with the display tag’s LOD setting. Try increasing the LOD percent or just disable the LOD parameter altogether and see what happens.
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FYI, this is what it looks like here, rendered at 800×600 with a render time of 42 seconds:
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