For
making it a little bit more organic add
a "Noise"
modifier to the plane. The value depends
on the size of your plane, so just tweak
them until they look right. Don't make
it to extreme because that will make things
more diffecult in the later steps and
also needs to be done in a different way.
More about that at the end.
Select
the grass shaft. Now select the plane
to be the "Distribution
Object"
for the grass, this button is just at
the top of the scatter object. Set "Duplicates"
to 100. You maybe need to adjust the scale
as well depending on the size of your
plane/grass. Uncheck "Perpendicular"
and set the distribute type to "Area"
Go
and change the "Rotation"
to X: 10 Y: 784 Z: 10. Y is the shafts
Z axis so keep that value quite high and
irregular to have more natural results.
Change "Scaling"
to 10x10x10 and set "Lock
Aspect Ratio".
Under display options set "Display"
to 5%, this will hide 95% of your grass
in the viewport, so you'll have faster
feedback. Check "Hide
Distribution Object",
this will hide the extra copy of the plane
which was created by the scatter object
it self. Scroll up and set "Duplicates"
to 5000.
Next
step: Animating. Add a "Volume
Select"
to your grass object and set it to "Vertex",
go into sub-object mode and move the gizmo
up so it's only selecting the top vertices.
Turn on "Use
Soft Selection"
and change the "Falloff"
so that all but the bottom vertices get
selected. There is a slight color change
that indicates if a vertice is selected
or not, dark blue mean it's still selected,
then it will change to a brighter blue,
which means that it isn't inside the falloff
range anymore. This is very important
since in the next step we will apply another
modifier which will use this selection
to animate the vertices. If this is not
set up correctly the grass will start
shifting at the bottom.
After
you're done with tweaking the soft selection
add a "Wave"
modifier on top of it and set it to "Amplitude
1&2":
5.0, "Wave
Length":
35.0 and animate the "Phase"
by setting a key at frame 100, value 3
or 4. Also go into sub-object mode and
rotate the gizmo by 90 degrees to have
the gizmo's deformed side in the Z direction
other wise it will deform the grass in
the wrong way. Again these values depend
on the size of your object.
Make
a copy of the wave modifier and add it
on top again. Change the values like this
for example; "Amplitude
1&2":
3.0, "Wave
Length":
50.0 set the "Phase"
value lower like 2.0 or 1.0 This will
give a secondary animation to it and will
vary the result a little. You could also
go and rotate the gizmos to add even more
variety. To add some small movement for
the blades use a "Noise"
modifier and set it to: check "Fractal",
set "Strength"
X: 6.0 Y: 4.0 Z: 6.0 and check "Animate
Noise".
Again, the values are depending on your
object's scale.
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That's
it actually, now all you need to do
is tweak the settings to get the result
you want.
Tip:
For surfaces with grass that are not
planar you need to use "Object"
for the volume select, make a copy of
the surface you want the grass to be
on, collapse it, add a "Optimize"
modifier with a high value and use "Solidify"
it will extrude the surface along it's
normals to give it volume. Solidify
is a freeware pluging that you can find
here: http://www.maxplugins.de/. Use this new mesh the same way
you did with the original box gizmo.
Another important thing is that scatter
can only make a maximum amount of 65.000
duplicates, so if you need more simply
make a copy of your grass object and
change the seed value. How ever this
technique is very memory intensive when
using hugh amounts of grass as well
as takes quite some time to render.
You should not use this in big scenes
if you have less then 1Gb of memory.
