Today, I'm going to show you exactly how I
scatter objects like grass and flower inside of Blender, only
using the particle system. Let's start with the plane first. I'm going to go over here into my Particle Properties and hit this plus,
which creates a particle system. By default, it creates an
emitter particle system. But what we need is hair. When we select hair, this is how it looks. Basically what it is doing is it is
scattering 1,000 hairs on this plane. Instead of it displaying hair, we want it to display grass or flowers
or whatever assets we have. Let's go and get the grass assets. I usually use QuixelBridge
for 90 % of the assets I use. Here are some free resources and add-ons
you can use to get these grass assets. And inside of this, you can see we have
multiple types of grass and this is really going to help us in creating
more variations in our grass. Now what we need to do is we have to select all these and put these
into a single collection. For that, I'm going to hit M and create
a new collection and name this as grass. Now we have set up the grass
to be scattered on the plane. Now let's scatter the grass. I'm going to select my plane and
go into the particle system. Let's name this as grass
and over here as well. In our render properties,
we have multiple options. Right now it is set as default,
which is render as path. We can either do it on a single object, which is I can come over here and
select a single type of grass. It is going to scatter it. Right now you can see it
is super small, right? We can easily fix that by
increasing the scale amount over here. That is if we only want to use
a single object and scatter it. But right now we have different objects which is going to make a lot more
variations in the scattering. I'm going to select collection in this and drag and drop this collection over
here, which is going to randomly select all these different types
of grass and scatter it. Also going to select pick random, and
we can adjust the scale over here. And if I want to increase the number of grass, I can come over here
and increase the number. Right now there are 3,000 copies
of this grass on this plane. Okay, that is looking good. And if I render this out,
this is how it looks. You can see that even though we have scattered different types of grass, we
can clearly see a pattern being repeated. That is because all of these
grass have the same rotation. So let's work on fixing that. We have to randomize the rotation of this. For that, I'm going to select our plane
and I have to enable this advanced mode, which is going to give me
these rotation settings. Otherwise, that would not be visible. Let's randomize phase set to one and
let's increase the phase to one. Now let's render it out again. And this is how it looks right now. Let's compare these two side by side. The one on the right is without the random rotation and the one on the left
is with the random rotation. You can see this one is much more realistic and it is breaking up the
pattern which this one was making. Okay, that is all looking good, but we can do one more thing to take our
scattering to the next level. Right now all these graphs are
scaled in the same exact size. What we need to do is the same way we
did a randomness for the rotation. We have to add a randomness
to the scale as well. I'm going to select my plane and where you
saw render where we scaled things up, just beneath that you can also see
a scale randomness value. Let's set that to 0.3, which is going to decrease the size of grass
by a maximum of 30 %. And whenever you scale down grass, it is
obviously going to show the ground more. I'm going to also crank up the number
of instances and let's render this out. We have rendered out the randomized
scale and randomized rotation one. This is the one with only the randomized rotation, while this is the one with the
randomized scale and randomized rotation. You can see it is not a big difference,
but you can definitely see in this one there is a much more variation
in the scale of the grass. That is how you scatter if you
only have a single object. What if I want to scatter
another layer of objects to it? Let's say I'm going to scatter
a group of flowers to this. I'm going to use this one, Field Poppy. There we have it. I'm going to do the same thing again. I'm going to select all these, put this
into a new collection called flower. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the plane and
duplicate particle system. Right now these two are linked. That is what this two denotes. Whatever change I make over here, it is going to affect this as well, but
I don't want it to be like that. I'm going to click on this
button, New Particle Settings. Right now the two went away, which means right now these two are not
connected, which is what we want. I'm going to name this flower because we are going to be scattering
flower with this layer. Let's drag and drop our flower collection
in here, and it is scattering the flower. We don't want the flower to be as dense as the grass, so I'm going
to make this maybe 300. Okay, that looks good. Maybe 300 looks good. And because we duplicated the grass and made a new copy of it, everything we did
earlier, like the randomization of the rotation, randomization of the scale,
is going to be applied to this as well. So we don't have to do the work again. Once the system is built, then you can
copy it and use it over and over again. Now let's render this out
and see how that looks. We have some nice-looking
flowers right now. Now, what if I want certain areas of this plane to not have any
grass or flowers on it? We can do that as well. I'm going to select my plane, subdivide the plane, I'm going to our object
properties and create a new Vertex group. I'm going to name this Scatter. I'm going to disable our scattering for
now and go into our Weight paint mode and paint where I don't want
the assets to be scattered. Okay, that looks good. I'm going to enable the scattering
and go back into our Object mode. Under here, you can see we have Vertex
groups and we have density and length. Here I am going to plug in our scatter
map we just made for grass and flower. Right now it is limited to only that part. The best thing is if I come over here and I paint it, it is going
to update in real time. But what if I wanted to invert the mask? I can do that as well. I have to select the plane, go into our
Particle Settings, and under here, you can see on the right side we have
this little arrow thing. If I enable that, it
is going to invert it.
