Creating Grass | the Cheap and Easy Way | Blender 2.81

hello and welcome to gaba media I'm grant Abbott and today we are making some beautiful graphs to go with our rock and wood you can find lots of these playlists on gamma dot uk' or you can just check my youtube channel under the playlist section so this is the second part of the texture painting with stencils course and many people asked how I do the grass so here we go this is the sort of cheapest and easiest way of making grass and is often used by game engines because it's best for performance will be using particle systems and I'll give a brief introduction to what they are and how to use them so so far you should have a rock and a post I'll just make these into a very simple scene so a very very simple rock and poster scene that you might see maybe at the beach I don't know why you would but you can make up your own scenes more importantly is the grass so shift a to add a plane and this is going to be the emitter for our grass so I'll scale it up just go to the top view and align it to the center of our little scene here so our grass will go on here now I'm going to keep it as a simple plane for now but later on we will need to subdivide it but I'll explain more about that later so the first thing we want to do is add some sort of texture to this so that anytime we see the base we see some sort of grass texture so let's go to the shading tab and choose new and I'm going to plug in a grass texture now all the textures for the grass that I'm using are from textures calm you'll find them under nature and under plants and they must be an alpha so they've got to have this sort of checkered pattern in the background that tells you that they are an alpha texture so they have a transparent Channel and you can see all these beautiful grasses here and it's good to have maybe three or four to add lots of nice variation for a grass texture you might want to go back to the actual grass section here and choose some sort of grass texture I believe on polygons there's a really nice forest ground texture and that can be quite a good one to use especially if you want to use a PBR for the base and have some sort of bump in it that's more if you are actually going to see some of the base and you only want a small amount of grass particles so back to blender let's add some sort of grass texture in here then so shift a texture image texture it's open our grass so you can see I've got lots of grass textures here and I'll just use a very basic one here plug that in and we've got some really chunky grass I'll press ctrl T on my texture you must have the node Wrangler add-on installed I've talked about this before but edit preferences add-ons type in node Wrangler and make sure it's a ticked that way you can click on your texture and press ctrl T and get up the texture coordinates and mapping and I can bump the scale up by clicking and dragging over all three of these scale options and maybe up to five and there we've got some grass again I'm not going to see much of this base texture so I'm not too worried what it looks like it is possibly a touch bright so we could easily add something in here let's say shift a color brightness and contrast work hue and saturation curves I'll just have a hue and saturation this time and bring down the value a bit there we go so it's a bit darker I went for hue and saturation because you can actually change the hue if you want as well but I might have it a bit more yellowy but we'll see it's probably a good idea as well to put up the roughness and the specular down and then it looks more grassy and less like a shiny plain okay so that's a really basic texture you don't have to put this hue and saturation in you can do a PBR texture if you like but we're more interested in the particle system so with the plane selected let's go back to layout mode so we've got more space to play with and down to the particles which is over here so let's add a particle system and I'll explain exactly what they do there's two types there's emitter and hair emitter if I press the spacebar you can see it's emitting things and you can add an object to these and make it emit certain objects from your plane you can also change the gravity and the direction and all sorts but we want to go for hair so I'll press spacebar again to stop my animation and go to hair and you can see it's got all these strands coming up like this very tall at the moment but don't worry about that but when you're wanting to create grass you're using the hair particle system also we'll want to tick advanced there's lots of options within advanced like mutation and so forth that we'll want to use now it's worth pointing out again at this point that there are two ways of doing the sort of grass hair particles one is to actually model a grass clump so getting some planes making them into grass strands rotating them bending them and all sorts to make a complex grass object or we can do it the more simple way which won't give as good a results but it's much cheaper on your processor and that's what a lot of game engines use is much easier to set up as well and with a bit of tweaking you can get it looking pretty amazing so before I change any of my settings here I'm going to add that texture in that we're going to use and duplicate so each of these strands will become that texture so I'll go into top view and move my cursor over to here so it will be off the plane and in order for this to work we need to have another and on enabled and that is image Planes so edit preferences add-ons and then type image import images as planes make sure that's ticked that way when we press shift a and we go down to image we've got images planes now we can go to our grass textures and you can see all these transparent textures here if you want to use just one texture you can have all your grass in one texture and that is better for less texture calls in games and performance wise so I'm just going to go for this one here and press import images planes and the great thing about this if I just quickly go across to the shading mode to see how it's set up it's set up our grass plugged into our principal shader using the Alpha so it's transparent I'll just zoom in on the object so you can see it it's also set up in our options the Alpha Bend and the opaque so it will be see-through so this is great let's go back to layout now and I'll just get in a position where I can see the plane and the particles so let's click on the particle system again or the plane which has the particle system and we want to tell the particle system to use this object instead of these strands like this and that's under render instead of saying render as path we render as object you can actually use a collection as well so you can put lots of these in a collection and choose which ones you want and so forth I'm just going to keep it simple and go for object so we've got object but they're not appearing that's because we haven't chosen our object so where it says object down here we click on the color picker pipette or whatever you want to call it and we choose our fluffy grass and there they all are now you'll notice that they're halfway through the plane like this that's because our object Center is in the center of our plane so if I go back to my plane over here on my fluffy grass I need that object center or pivot point to be at the bottom so we can now in blender 2.81 go to options and origins and then we can move that origin if you're using an earlier version you actually have to go into edit mode and move the whole thing and the origin stays still but this way we can just press G then said pull it down and then go back to options and uncheck origins so if you want to move that origin point you have to go up to options and origins make sure it's ticked and then we can move the origin and if you want to go back to normal you UNTAC origins so now I can grab in a Zed no move the whole thing okay now if we look at our plane you can see that all sticking up from the origin point that's great it doesn't look great at the moment though so there's a few settings we need to change let's click on our plane what I forgot to say somehow in recording is that you must have the advanced box tick so it's just under hair there that will give us a few extra options like rotation coming up in a moment now still under the render settings we can change the scale and we can scale it up maybe somewhere around there and the scale randomness is useful as well because it adds variation and we're looking a bit better now it's worth noting that the scale randomness always brings things down it never makes things bigger than the scale up here so if you want to make the whole thing bigger you bring it up there and then more randomness will bring some of them down ok looking better but there's still a few things we need to do one of the main things is rotation I'll take on rotation and bring down the disclosure and there's a few things we'll want to change in there but before you do that it's really helpful to go down to the children panel and we want to change it across to interpolated so basically we have a display amount and a rendered amount so in the viewport we can see ten times our fur go to the top here number which is 1000 without the interpolation and then we got this funny children option here which adds for each of those adds another tenth the rendered amount is actually adding a hundred so it's got a display amount and a rendered amount for fast viewport interactions now we don't really need that many and I think this is actually enough so we'll keep the rendered amount at ten as well and if I just click off you can see what that looks like and that's certainly fine it may actually be a bit too many so I'm going to just turn it down to five and the rendered amount to five as well so you will want to play with these a little bit and see what they look like I'm using this sort of my base grass so I might turn the scale up a little bit so under the render settings maybe come up with a scale and maybe just a few more then eight I think okay that's great now the problem is they look great from this side and not so much from this side and that's obviously because we're using a plane and that's where we want to use that rotation option so let's go back up to rotation and we've got some randomize options here but when I drag that across that doesn't do anything we've got a phase option and that moves them all together which is quite interesting and I believe you might be able to do some animation with that and we got the randomized phase there now the randomized phase is working quite well and that's working when we move around and it's making the grass look half decent but notice the randomize isn't doing much and that's to do with the orientation axis at the moment it's fine under velocity slash hair and it's working well for what we want if you press something like the global Zed then that will definitely all point directly upwards and then the things like the randomize actually start working and you can even use this with some animation as well so there's a few options in here the globalized said will always point straight upwards and then you can add some randomize to it and that's probably the safest way but sometimes you just have to tweak and see what works well for you especially if you've got some sort of Hills going on in here and things that might make a bit of a difference so at the moment it's looking quite nice we could possibly up the count a bit but let's see what it looks like when we add another particle system now there is one thing that's worth pointing out if you choose object rotation they all go flat and it's a very strange thing this I don't particularly understand why this happens but for some reason you will need to rotate this so it's flat so our Y 90 and then they all stand up I don't really understand why that is maybe some clever blender we're out there can tell me but it's something you don't have to worry about too much if you haven't got the object rotation ticked and it's got an orientation axis here but you may find that when you're fitting around you might want to use the object rotation if you're using some of these other ones here to get the right look and there is a bit of experimentation depending on your scene so let's add another one in let's shift a images planes and we'll find another grass texture so this time I'll use this interesting one here actually no this one looks quite interesting this looks quite fluffy so I'll go for the fluffy grass today so which is that one I just move it to the side slightly they might be a bit too similar we'll see how we get on so back on our plane another particle system choosing hair again so there's our hair standing up I'm going to turn the other one off for a moment so this one here I'll call this fluffy grass because that's the name of the texture so fluffy grass is our original and turn that off for the moment so we can only see this new one which is tall fluffy grafts it does help to name your particle systems if you're doing it this way around so same process again choosing object and then actually choosing the correct object with the pipette and across here again it's in the middle so we'll have to change that origin point so click on our grass up to origins grab that origin in the ten axis and move it down to the bottom and tick origins hopefully there'll be a shortcut for that soon and back to our particle system to play with the settings so first of all down to children interpolated and we don't want so many of this so we'll just go one and one because this is going to be a bit taller so in fact we don't really need the children but I'm leaving there just in case I want to increase the count so back up to the render settings and we'll change the scale this one's going to be quite tall maybe somewhere around there and again a nice lot of randomness we'll just quickly check what that looks like with the other one in I'll turn overlays off for a second and we might want to make our fluffy grass a bit taller it's looking pretty interesting the fluffy grass this isn't helpful that I've called them both fluffy grass the original fluffy Kravis we might want to actually make a tiny bit shorter so bring that one down a touch there we go it's looking quite interesting but we still need to change that phase and that randomness so let's turn the original fluffy grass off so we can see the effects of that and move into a position where we want to change the rotation and we'll go to our rotation panel with our tool fluffy grass and notice that the rotation is not appearing that's because I haven't ticked advanced so tick on advanced to make sure you get that rotation option now we can start playing around with the phase and the phase random and see what's going on maybe somewhere around there when we bring the other one back it's starting to look fairly good and perhaps we want to use the global Zed so they're all pointing upwards and then that random phase will turn them in the other direction now notice what happens when I use the object rotation and rotate this so it's flat I'll tell my overlays back on so I can see what I'm clicking on our y 90 now when I click back on the emitter and go to that rotation I get slightly more options when I change it to global Zed and start using the randomize so I can move it around a bit more so that's what the object rotation allows us to do and that does look a bit nicer and offers a bit more variation to our grass so I quickly had a third one just for some more variation choose this one here I'll move it across and move the origin point click on my plane add a new emitter I'll just hide the other ones for now use the hare use advanced go to render object choose my object with the pipette and let's change the scale and vary it a bit now I feel like there's a bit too many of these so I can actually just change the number on the admit err and bring it right down so I'm bringing it down to maybe 500 or something maybe even less than that 300 there we go make sure object rotation is ticked they'll all go flat so we need to rotate our object our Y 90 and they're all standing up now these ones are very similar to the ground planes a little bit tricky to see but click on our ground plane again I better name this I'm gonna call it yellow because it's got slightly yellow pieces in and let's make sure rotation is ticked use that z-axis global Zed bit of randomness bit of random phase bring the other ones back turn off overlays and see how we're looking I think maybe some of them are a bit tall so we need to mess with the settings a bit more and I think I need a bit more in between so I might even choose a sort of greener grass to go in the middle of everything so I quickly time app set at this point you might want to go in and start changing the scales of your grass to something more suitable they think like this grass is completely overtaking the landscape but you might want that the last thing we want to do is go up to the shading tab and put in some sort of environment so let's press full stop or period key on an unpaired the zoom into my plane and turn the overlays off for now so let's go to world and we want to add an HDR eye so shift a texture environment texture and find a nice HDRI image so these are images that surround the background and they offer some light as well I use this nice one from the beach in my previous one I'll probably go with that again I think because I think it looked great hook that one up HDRI Haven have lots of lovely HDR eyes that you can download for free so that's great it's not appearing so we need to go to the render tab to find that one now if I start zooming in the background kind of blends in with our scene although we've got a bit of grass compared to the beach it just depends on your angle a little bit so got that that looks fine the other thing that you'll want to do is go across to your render tab and turn on ambient occlusion that will just add that ambient occlusion that you need in the rocks and things you might want to depending on the size your scene turn it up can you see the effect that's having when I turn it up just adds that shading in between the grass so I'm going to on this scene up to 1.25 you have to be a bit careful you can see in there it's sort of blending on to the other rock but it seems to be working alright and that's looking quite nice really the very last thing that you may want to do with your camera in your scene so if I press 0 to go to my camera settings N and view lock camera to view and find a nice position for my camera somewhere around here let's say you might want to choose a depth of field that will allow the background edges to go all blurry so with your camera selected you can go to your camera settings and then choose depth of field and let's choose one of these posts as a focus object so that one there and the aperture you need to bring quite low in order for depth of field to work the interesting thing is that I'm sure that the focal length make a big difference to this but when I said that to the developers they didn't agree with me so you have to put your f-stop unnaturally low I would say to something like 0.5 and then you can see that depth of field and that's actually an extremely low aperture but if someone else knows about depth of field and they can advise me on that I'd be very grateful but there we've got some lovely grass textures happening and our scenes looking great I'll probably do a few tweaks that the size of some of these because I think they were it big but hopefully that gives you enough information to create your own grassy beautiful landscapes thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 86,413

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, grass, games, landscape, nature, rendering, simple

Id: M9RgRQYJjeM

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019