Hi All,

I have a project that requires me to use Maya and I’ve been an avid Max user for about ten years.  So I’m just learning the ropes.  In Maya, I want to recreate the grass displacement technique found on Jeff Patton’s website--he figured out a great solution for creating ALOT of grass that renders with remarkable speed, but he devised the technique in Max.  Any takers out there who might want to translate this technique into Maya?

Here is the link to the grass displacement technique found on Patton’s website:

Grass Displacement Technique by Jeff Patton

Thanks,
Laz

3DSMax 2011 | Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Apple iMac 27” Bootcamp
Intel Core i7 3.4GHz
16GB RAM
ATI (AMD) Radeon HD 6970M

You should be able to apply the same techniques in Maya…
I’ll take a closer look at it Friday.

n8skow [FA]

And with those render times (3.5 min) you can try PaintFx or maybe FUR to get nicer looks to your grass

Yeah, I definitely would prefer the PaintFX stuff, but I have an “infinite” plane that I need to apply the grass to.  I don’t think I could do that with even the auto paint feature.  Also, I want to make sure I can get shadows with mental ray’s sun / sky.  Will the sun / sky setup from mental ray cast shadows from the PaintFX?

Thanks for the suggestion!

3DSMax 2011 | Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Apple iMac 27” Bootcamp
Intel Core i7 3.4GHz
16GB RAM
ATI (AMD) Radeon HD 6970M

You can only use mental ray if you convert the paint fx to geometry first… Don’t use fur though, it takes forever!

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Have you already got your camera movement and composition planned?
I’d use paintFX or fur for the up close stuff - billboard/cards for mid-distance, and then maybe the displacement surface in the far-distance. All kinda depends on what will or won’t be seen though…

Here’s a quick grass I made driving displacement with the leather material (cellular) with colors set to black and white, and a very small/dense cell size.

I ran the leather material thru a multiply/divide node to crank up the displacment a bit larger than default.

n8skow [FA]

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I have been trying to figure a way to manipulate Jeffs Grass Tut. for Maya also for about over a year already. I also am running into the same problem since everything is done in 3DMax and cannot figure a way to use it in Maya. Has anyone came up with a good solution? His tut.. is excellent but been searching for a large field of grass for Maya. I think Fur is alot better then PaintFX but run into crashing a lot as I too have a very large scene. Any help would be great.

I have also tried rendering out just patches of grass and bringing them into After Effects and compositing them, but the edges are very apparent even when turning on multiply, or add, or lighten, etc…

Thank you

You could always just paint a 1mx1m patch of paintfx grass and then instance it everywhere or mr proxy it everywhere. I’ve done that before and it works out quite well.

Here’s another test project - just threw a simple displacement map on a grass diffuse - looks alright from a distance…

n8skow [FA]

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WOW!!! I was just playing Mass Effect and was checking out some of there grounds that have a grassy texture to them and was wondering how they went about doing that. Then not even a day later I look at this post and was amazed. Its almost identical looking to what they had in there game. I am so glad you can around and posted this.

A few questions though. Can you explain a little more in depth on how you place the displacement map onto the grass diffuse. What kind of nodes are you using too? Can I use a mia_material(x)? Or does it not really even matter?

I can’t speak for Mass Effect, but for this grass, you can use a Maya material or a MentalRay material. You have to plug the displacement into the ‘displacement’ slot in the SurfaceGroup (SG) node of the material.

My grass happened to be a mia_material, and I added a multiply/divide node between the b/w texture and displacement node so I could crank up the effect a bit without having to edit the texture manually.

n8skow [FA]

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