[peengoh]

I will post this in english since i believe is what most of the community can understand.

I have been making tests on several ways to make grass render good and fast using Mental Ray, helped me a lot tips from jeff pattons blog as well as Alessandro Prodan´s work and djx blog there are a few things i want to share...

First, the three methods i have found:

1. Displacement material, with a distance based falloff to decrease render times, also rendering without displacement, freezing FG map and rerendering with displacement.

it gives a nice result, fast, but no the fastest, on close-ups looks not-so-good. good for big lawns.

2. Fur used as Grass, using Puppet´s Geometry Shaders
fairly fast, good mid range results.

3. Using paint FX converted to geometry, making a patch of grass and then using that patch with MR proxies. the patch proxy objects are painted on the surfaces using Maya´s geometryPaint.

the fastest, results depend on how much time and effort you put on making the patch.
Cons: placing the geometry can be tricky but once you get some practice is easy enough
Pros: super fast, specially if you use BSP2 that takes advantage of MR proxies, and you can render literally millions of polygons.

If you need more details just ask. I´m planning to make a tutorial, but i haven´t found the time.

[DESPISTADO]

orale peengoh que bien se ve esa grama aunque me confundi cuando dices que renderizaste sin el displacement.

Saludos

[peengoh]

ah pues el problema es que FG + displacement alenta mucho el render, asi que lo que se hace es, desactivar el displacement, rendereas un pass de puro FG (en los globals de MR pides solo FG pass) y congelas el FG map. Luego prendes el displacement y rendereas como el FG map esta congelado asi que ya no lo calcula y no ves practicamente ninguna diferencia en el displacement.

espero este mas claro

OH! the problem with FG + displacement slows the render down a lot, so the way to go is to disable the displacement, make just a FG pass (in MR globals there is an option to just make FG maps) and then freeze the FG map. After that the displacement is enabled and another render is made with the frozen FG map, so the calculation is skipped, saving lots of time and no difference is seen on the displacement.

[eddgarpv]

guys, let's keep english here.

[breton]

Great!

i love the way it looks... please, don't forget the tutorial! i'll need it for a job soon :P


*---

genial! me gusta mucho como se ve, no te olvides del tuto, casualmente lo necesito para una chamba que tengo y tengo que entregar pronto :P así que espero eso. ^_^

[modernPrimitiv]

Fantastic idea. The proxies work like a charm - much faster than fur! Thanks so much!

[thewipe]

good idea! never thought would be cool to try and test a grass field myself, I think it would be cool if there's tutorial of a fairly good looking grass! thanks for this.

[btester2]

Hi! Thanks for sharing your method I have one question, how did you populate the scene with the Proxies? I am trying to do that now and it doesn't seem to want to do it. Also how did you get to view your Proxies as planes? I can only view them as boxes. Am I wrong in assuming you are using MR Proxies?