Making realistic ground and grass using Octane and C4D

okay so for this first section let's prep all our assets so we can use them in a full like landscape image later so to start um I'll usually establish like a ground plane and stuff so that we can like set something up with our scatter systems so to start let's grab our plane and I'll usually make it about like a thousand to each side just so we can get like some sort of size will adjust our scatters and stuff to be the size and then the justice scale of the objects in there scatters to be more or less around the size of our scale dummy so with ground I don't really like working on a flat plane as I feel that really hinders the ability to like dial in your assets especially with like shadows like you won't get like any nice like sort of like shadowed areas and stuff so to do that let's increase our with segments and height segments to 200 so that you can see we have like a lot of topology now so when we add in our displace or object here let's put it underneath let's bring the height up to like a hundred or so we can always like a just after in the shading let's add in a noise and you can see by default edges its way to sort of like tiled I guess so let's go in here let's bring this up so we can see everything for the noise I like using to sort of create like my pearl procedural landscapes and stuff I'll usually go for like a blistered turbulence or the Nakki this one I'm just going to use the blister turbulence so let's tile it glass so on the global scale let's try a thousand that still seems too much for me let's try five thousand so you can see like right away we're starting to get a little bit more of like a natural looking sort of like field here then we can increase the BOK tapes a bit you can see how like we get more and more noise going on and we're going to like play with this seed until you find something that is a little bit more like interesting to look at and I will provide like a nice little like valley and stuff to use to like it like some good shadow and light variation some like that might be fine float these Abed you so I'm going to do is increase it increase the contrast a bit but then let's go into our height as fun something like that would be fine for now we can always like play with that later even with our scatter setup on it so now I'm just going back into the shading mode because we don't really need that anymore so with this like smaller displacement - it really helps break up the tiling effect of our textures dohyo like talocan across it so for like all my tolerable materials and stuff I'll usually go to real displacement textures as I find this site has the best arm sort of photo scan textures basically on the market like in my opinion they like they're like leaps and bounds better quality than then say like mega scans market just because um I know that mega scans uses a little bit more like automated process whereas these guys do like they actually take the time to like dial in like each each asset solely like as you can see here this is like a whole bunch of like different materials sort of like blended together but they all look super crisp with their detail and stuff and um I like using these a lot better cuz like their displacement is just so much more balanced and like the detail is there even though you're like using like the 2k maps like the 4k maps are still nice and crisp and don't have like that muddy sort of like soft forms that a lot of the older mega scanners has so I Ford that I have actually like downloaded like a whole bunch and so I've like a big collection of them when you download them usually come in like a little pack here and you have like all your like difference in Mayas cinema4d for like Arnold octane beer a they now have some for the substance alchemist and stuff too and so want to download these instead of having to go into each sort of material and like find like okay so this is like The Barking looks like that all usually like duplicate duplicate like the little catalog image and just paste it up here inside my folder so that I can this like quickly like and click through them and like see if I or to find like whichever one I want to use in my scene so you can see like all the different variations and stuff there are so for this ground I'm going to probably use this soil 14 um you guys can use like whichever ones you want you can like download them from mega scans or like texture Haven or whichever ones I'm going to use mostly these things throughout the tutorial bye yeah for you guys can definitely follow along with the other ones so actually I'm gonna bring this back here this lower so let's create our octane material here apply it to our ground so how I like to set stuff up let's go to our cell 14 I don't really like using like their pre-built ones as I don't use a lot of things better in it I like to like build my own and like optimize it in a way that works for me so I'll be sort of showing you guys how I go about doing that so what I'll be grabbing is all the 4k stuff because um for the types of illustration that we will be doing we don't really need the 8k like we won't be going like super close up to it it's just we need more need like the like the information from it not necessarily like the super fine detail that will one won't have in the 4k so I'll grab the 4k color depth he ascribed the high-gloss and the roughness I'll move that to the side and in our node editor here as drag-and-drop those four in there let's change this material so it's a glossy material and let's attach our high gloss Taurus back color into our diffuse roughness into roughness unless a displacement and they'll pop up this node so we can attach the displacement to that so with the black and white images will actually save a lot of the RAM if we change their type to flow and this turns it from like a three vector value to oh like a one vector value which is like way less on the v-- around to calculate and stuff but I've noticed like want to change like once they're like all my materials and change all these to float I had actually saved like a couple gigs of VRAM so it's a significant like memory like savings when you do that so now we have our material source set up actually let's change our displacement to 4k for now I'll slower that we don't need that guy so let's turn on ba pain and I'll just dock it on the side here click to sort of like see let's turn it on and you can see now we got like our ground plane but it looks like perhaps tilt because we don't really have a proper light and we need to adjust our displacement and the tiling so was bringing a light I'll use the octane daylight because that fall you guys will have it and you'll be able to sort of a little bit better follow along I'm gonna rotate it down a bit so good like some good lighting going on here you like that much this time you so let's go to back to our note editor here and with the displacement let's start to increase it a little bit um so you can see now how like nice and crisp like the details are released for these scenes um so let's go to our octane settings for doing these like realistic landscapes and stuff it's a lot better to do them and path tracing because then you get like proper global illumination bounces and like the light you like shyster like all our like grass and stuff a lot better so for the settings let's just change it to a 124 for now for the Mex apples the diffuse depth I'll usually keep it at 4 sometimes I'll put up to 6 if it doesn't like feel right but that's just more like it doesn't really do anything visible from what I can see there's just like a little like buffer I like to have but respect depth I should bring that down to eight all this stuff I'll leave by default or the global illumination class I'll usually bring that down to ten and this will actually save a lot of render time after his ten bounces it stops sort of calculating this and after ten bounces you won't really see anything visual but it's still calculating up to like a hundred thousand whatever that default number was so I will save like a lot of time for when you're like rendering out like a thousand plus samples or whatever oops I'll also turn on adaptive sampling and this sort of the house on with the render times as well I'll usually just like leave that is default I find that's pretty much fine for what I like using you so now let's set up our are sort of like my world scale that we will be using across like all our assets and stuff so to do that um for my scenes I'll actually use like um this little guy I have is from jammas or I'm not sure how you say his name I think it's like jamorama his medieval set and all because I use these guys on quite a bit so I've been adjusting all my like world scale values to serve they're scale but I've actually like a mom I think adjusted their scale walls a little bit so let's bring that into our scene so for his scale size I think it's actually about like 85 centimeters so I felt like make my cube 85 85 85 yeah you'll see it's about like the same so if you want your scene scale what the same as mine um sort of adjust everything to be sort of like this size if you want to grab like a free character you can go to like mix among calm and just download like a random like default one of their little default more realistic looking people so then they're like sort of their forms are normal-sized and sort of adjust that to like the 85 centimeters so now we have our skill dummy in here let's adjust our ground ground plane tiling do more match that let's turn our render back on and let's bring this up to like or something you you can see your displacement is quite heavy still we'll adjust that as well we just need to get something a little bit closer here all Cyrus fortune you yeah something like this will work pretty well the thing I like about the real displacement textures - is because of like the super crisp displacement map and stuff I find I can get away with making that make making the ground tiles ground tiles in my cliff a lot less tile than what it's realistic sort of values art which is nice so I can get like a lot more variation in my cliffs and stuff you so for the ground let's lower the displacement a little bit here ecology end up like over driving a bit just because uh I find them to psyche makes a little bit nicer for like illustrative purposes so you get like a little bit more of a shadow and stuff like that like a nice little Iraqi field here and with the with that display sir that we had it in you can't really see like the tiling of the ground plane at all so now if we like go back to our display sir we can go into the noise that we created and play with like the random and artha as the seed of the noise you can see sort of like how it's getting like tiles and stuff this one which is Prayer scale dummy down there you you you okay so another thing I like to do in my scenes is blend multiple ground materials together and that helps to break up the tiling even more and give a lot more variation in our scene so to do that let's build another octane material let's open this up going to our node editor and let's grab a little bit more of like a rocky material go down to my little images here and the RGS are for like rocky ground and one I like to use a lot is this rock ground 7 so house like a nice like nice big like rock forms and it just looks really good especially with the types of sort of Canadian sort of like mountain landscapes I like to make so I end up using this one a lot actually so I'd bring that into our scene you and the same thing I'll bring in depth or is it dwell with the high-gloss as bring the high-gloss those got a little bit more respect variation roughness and the color you you a lot of those handles make sure you change it to a glossy material at our displacement attach our displacement to that okay so now let's duplicate our plane our new material to that you can see like right away we're starting to get like some rocks like showing up go into our displacement here let's bring our level of detail to 4k and let's start to increase displacement for that just a mid-level bit and you can see even if you just want like a few rocks going on in your scene we can sort of like adjust it so only like the tops of the rocks are showing here so when I do sort of like these like layer blending I'll usually like end up merging our display sirs together just so it's a single object and that way I can use the sculpt tools to sort of bring out where I want these rocks and where I don't want them so I'll usually like lower it a little bit just so I get a little bit by default but then I'll use the graph tool sort of bring out some you so you can see sort of how you can really customize it shows up to kill any variation you're seeing in your scene so with those rocks I think I'll actually tile those a little bit more like that so we got like nice medium sized rocks here and even like in the closer ups top spots you're still getting like a decent amount of detail to you okay so now that we have a decent ground plane set up now we have something to build our scatters on and we can like dial in the the textures and materials for them so like my grasses and stuff and plants I'll usually end up just going to mega scans and using they're sort of like 3d plants and stuff in my sort of collection I have I have like stuff from my Forester and I make ask and stuff like that for this tutorial I'll just be grabbing stuff from my mega scans because I know that a lot of people in the community sort of used that um so first let's grab some grass and so if you have the newest updated version of bridge let's go to the 3d plants here to grass and I'm actually going to use this thatching grass because it's got a lot of variation in it which is perfect for what we need so you can like click the download button purchase or whatever so with the new quick sille it has the export button instead of I'm having to like click the click to navigate to the folder and then like manually drag in our materials we can actually click this export button and it will set up all our all our geo assets and set up the materials for it we just have to make sure our export settings are set up to be how we want it like the so we want to be like the 4k textures JPEG so we're not using too much more vram than we need because especially because it's just like some low detail grass um mesh explore will be the FBX and Allah tell you just keep this as default so just loads in like whichever one make sure you adjust be the software you wanted to send to and so let's export this right now you see it'll be exporting to cinema export is successfully and you see now we have our graphs in our scene but there is an issue because I've brought it in and attached it to cinema 4d material and seven octane one so you can see it's not rendering properly in our viewport here so let's actually delete all these and delete our material here so one step we have to do to tell bridge to export it into here and to set up to use a four octane material what we'll do is go into our render settings here and change our render to use octane and this kind of tells like bridge looks here to see what render we're using and then set up a material based on that so now that we have that set to octane lets re-export that again it'll say it's export is successfully and now we have all our octane materials set up we might have to refresh the render maybe yeah there we go smell we're getting our grass and it's got like everything stuff in it we can go and check our material as well just loading in the textures and stuff you and you can see added it all like the proper materials and even used octane notes to do so which is nicer because then we can dab like he was like these quick little adjustments or I didn't like the transform if we need to first or now sets rotate and like move the texture so let's pause our scene and let's properly set up our material to use transmission and still have our glossiness in it so let's close all these windows here also I noticed like there's a lot more scene like one I have textures on in the viewport so I'll usually go to options here and this turn off textures especially when I have obtained working along beside it I don't really need to like see the textures in this viewport because I can just see like what's going on over here so let's just sort of organize these guys let's just like click on each one just like drag them out so let's see what's going on you so to turn them that's what it's you you you you you don't need that for a second you you so you see with this sort of like little grass pack how many variations of the grass there are and so with grass I was very tiling it's so much or not tiling it will be scattering it with a like a lot of instances like into the millions it tends to look repetitive real fast so having a lot of variation in your grass really helps to get rid of that sort of duplicated effect so these like little flat ones I don't really ever end up using those at all especially with like the displaced ground or usually end up getting spawned underneath everything it's also usually end up as deleting these guys and that makes it a little bit easier to dial in our scatters as well because we're not like fighting to get enough instances and not having like five of them show up so we got these guys all organized now let's build the materials for those you so the nice thing about the new octane is they have like the composite material and that allows us to build complex layered materials that live inside each other so like we don't have to have like three materials down here just for like the one mix material to like get attached or Agresso anymore we can just use this composite material so in here let's add a material for material one and add a material or two just move this guy to the side to make this bigger you so let's attach our albedo to both our diffuse let's make sure the second material 2 is set to glossy sore getting material with speck attach our normal maps in opacity you and our roughness here you yeah okay so we don't need this guy anymore well we didn't I wasn't going to use the transmission anyway so that's fine that's maybe retouch breakfast so it's actually going to be our next step was to save a little bit of VRAM by just using our albedo as our transmission because there won't be too much transmission or our grass anyways I like to actually use a little bit less than what would be probably considered realistic just because it gives it a little bit more more shadows and stuff which makes it but helps a lot for like creating our scenes because we're not going for a realism we're going for more like an illustrative look so let's bring in a color correction touched that mission through our albita there let's bring her brightness down to like 0.1 or so so I'm just gonna move this to the side here and let's start up a render again so you can see now our dress you you get a good bus you okay also I forgot to do one thing here and our material let's make sure we're going to material to and put the mask blending to like around like point five so we get equal amounts of both here okay so one thing we forgot to do is actually assign this material to our grass here so less shift-click all our grass notes here and let's grab this octane composite and drag it on top of this here you see how it will change and I'll actually update it to be our new composite material so let's change the name of this to the thatched grass change this guy's name - rocky ground seven and this guy will be come soil 14 I believe it was we can actually delete this guy now and let's focus on this one okay so now you can see when I play with the brightness of a transmission more light is able to shine through the grass and then when I bring it down to the zero you could see like there's no real light shining through it at all so that being said what I mentioned before you usually like to keep it a little bit then it probably should be let's bring it to like point to something like that so we're still getting some light shining through but not so much that we're killing all like the shadowed side of the grass and it'll help to skip like a lot more lighting variation to our grass in general so now we got earner sort of like default grass set up let's set up this scatter system for these so or the scatter system let's actually turn this off and let's delete it entirely let's just move these guys to the side and I'll usually like cut them below the sort of like default like ground plane there's so one we actually started building our scene with all our materials we don't get these things I popped up through our scene stuff so I'll usually end up this will be like my water level than everything else will be up higher okay so with scatter systems I'll usually end up breaking them up into a bunch of different ones rather than like having like all my plants inside of a single scatter I'll usually break them off so I'll have like one for like all our small grass I'll have one for all our big grass and then it'll go through and do like one for like the dandelions one for like the reeds and one for like our lure like leafy plants and stuff like that so we were able to sort of guide where we want them to be more instead of having them be all like evenly distributed throughout our scene it'll help make it look a lot more natural because like out in nature like they'll have like you'll have like a nice like little bundle of like plants here because that's where their seeds were able to sort of like spread to and then like another one will be over here another one to like be over here or something so we'll set up our scatter systems to sort of mimic that but to start I'll usually set up our small grasses to more or less just cover the entire thing more or less evenly so let's bring in a scatter system here then we can go to the octane settings no octane dialog and I'll bring up like this little window here we can bring in an octane scatter has changed named us to our small dress and let's grab probably these ones let's drag and drop them inside that I display to the quick change so it's a little bit easier to see okay so in here let's change our distribution to surface and in just a nurdle test scene like a gash Lee in general I'll usually put all my scatters on top of sort of like my default like soil plane here rather than like having it on my car this one's like our rocky ground plane and this one will be our soil all usually end up putting them on the soil just because it's where like the plants will actually grow naturally and we don't really want them like growing where there's like more rocks than normal I'd like where we'd like brought them out with our grad tool so let's click our scatter system and let's drop our soil onto the surface here and you see right away we're getting all our little scatter points okay so I think we can ooh um okay so let's bring your count up quite a bit and you can see by default it's actually going through actually let's actually start our octane render so I can show you guys a little bit better how this is sort of acting let's increase it a bit so you can see how we're getting like all these rows of the grass - we like don't want that of course to help get rid of this sort of like just like going through like this as grass 1 this is grass 2 this is grass 3 this is grass 4 and then like keep repeating it to break that up in the shader here under the vertex map let's add a noise and you can see by default we're starting to get some of it broken up but you can see a lot of it is still like grouped together and I'll actually do my groupings through a different way but to make these things truly random let's go into our noise here and let's change our noise to the cell so we get like variations of like little squares from like 0 to 1 or whatever change our global scale to be like 0.1 so it's a tiny so it can possibly be and you can see now we're actually getting like truly random grass distributed throughout our scene here rather than like the is the one of each iterated okay so let's go through some more of the basic set up here that I usually like to do for the normal align I'll usually bring it down a little bit for the grass for our sort of overall grass I'll still have it like like go with the form of the land a little bit but not like fully find that just seems a little bit too unrealistic but I still like to have like a whole bunch of it like 65% of it or so like that we don't need that anymore normal threshold so this is a good one for getting our grass to not grow like the sides of the hills are like the banks that reach a certain level of steepness and so this normal high here is like the max it's like steepness it will be for it just like spawn on it so you've seen now this is a like hillside here a lot of the grass has actually been removed from it as I likeable write less and less grass is able to show up in that region for my small grass I usually like to keep it like around like 4550 just sort of getting like some on that hillside but we're still getting like nice amount of coverage overall let's actually increase our coverage but a bit and let's go into our display here and lower our display rate to like like point seven-five or something just so we're not getting like all these like useless sort of points in our scene and so you can see now we're getting like nice variation of the grass especially lowered this a bit but also heavily depend on like your scene as well so now you can see like we're getting less grass in these sort of areas which is nice so now we have our sort of basic stuff set up let's go and make our grasses varied a little bit more so with that let's go and Oh random like a mole graph random to our scatter and that will help very like the size of it cuz right now you can see this seems sort of like barely uniform let's go to our mole graph effector random let's click our small grass here go to effectors let's drop the random on top of that so by default the random house position turned on essentially turn that off we'll take a second to think there we go let's turn our scale on let's turn on uniform scale and I usually like to give it like 30 percent variance and I usually help quite a bit and then with the rotation let's rotate it like a thousand give it a thousand degrees of variance we're getting a lot of variation with direction of grass break it up quite a bit like eh grass instance so now we can actually vary it very 8 the scale of our grass even more let's go back to our distribution here and let's go down to this scale tab here and in here let's change it to be uniform and let's change our shader let's add a noise in our shader actually let me just make that usable and you see if I default a lot of the grass is actually like almost disappeared for so this noise where whoops contrast this where it's black the scale of our grass will like be zero so essentially it's completely disappeared where it's white the grass will be like full like a hundred percent to like this scale the number here so with this I usually like to do something like a wavy turbulence or like a blister turbulence and I'll usually have the trance the contrast clamped up quite a bit you let me just bring this up so we can like see sort of how we're looking here and so with this I'll usually bring the global scale up to like actually let's keep that default so another thing with the tiling of this noise on our ground planes is it actually looks at the tiling of our UVs and our first texture note here so to sort of get like a default ground plane for all our scenes where I'll usually do there's a double click here to create a default cinema 4d no material let's bring that to our soil here that's what I'm going to do is put it on like the leftmost side so that our actual render picks up this material but our noises will pick up this one so now that we've added that end you'll see that like our noise by default is actually like four times less this one was tailed by four and these ones are the default one and I'll give us a much truer sort of like size for our scale of our noise especially once we bring it into actual scene that will create so I think that this scale is actually pretty good what I want to do in here is bring just more grass in general so it's actually lower a high clip here and you can see it's getting brighter overall you see now like more grasses actually showing up or still getting nice areas where the grass like where there's like no grass at all we're going to play with these ad plus more corporation in there and like as you like cycle through these noises you'll see sort of like how the grass reacts with them like this one you can see how it has like the sharp edges and then like a little bit of a smaller fall-off so now we're getting like this nice like sharp edge here we're like the super tall grass and I don't like fades out into like the smaller grasses and stuff but for the overall small grass all you just keep it as the blistered turbulence the story getting like a nice amount of variation and size overall and not really like any like start contrasted areas honestly bring it a little bit more grass overall thing I'll do that with the high clip here lowering that so I feel this is pretty good overall you so you'll notice I kept this size of our grasses default and so with that what we can do let me go closer to our guy here just sort of getting like a good sort of like size of our guy in comparison to the grass I'll usually end up keeping my grass a little bit bigger than those what net what is natural just so I don't have to adapt many more instances and because it's just for like illustrative purposes we don't really it is nice to have it to be like realistic scale but we can sort of like adjust that a little bit especially with like outdoor natural scenes were like no one's like mowed the lawn or whatever so it won't be like any short grass it will be like all this long natural grass so if your grass seems like too big or too small for your scene after we've done our sort of variation adjustments we can do is go into our scale number here and say my grass seems too small I can go in here and I'd like point five to it and you see our grass will like grow overall think this grass actually worked with the default of one so I'm going to keep it there okay so just before we move along um I actually went and optimized my grass a little bit just because those little laggy and my scene and I didn't really want it to be lagging out too much for like showing you guys how to do it I ended up lowering them all from 4 K 2 1 K except for like the roughness I lowered like to 512 because we don't really need this too much so you if you guys want you can keep the roughness in what I'm going to do is actually remove it entirely and then in the roughness here I'm just going to make it pretty rough to be sort of like almost a value this would be so probably right around 60 60 70 here give us the same sort of look but because you could see on our roughness map itself as such to bring this over here there's not too much variance where like actual like long grass pieces are like actually like contrasted variants on my to worry about having this map in there so I'm actually just gonna like keep that unattached for now and I'll actually help with like a VRAM and like speed up by rendering as well okay so our next step let's actually go and create our scatter system for our long grass I'm just gonna pause this for now let's go move this off-screen and let's grab the rest of our grass here we can actually use this as like a solid base for our tall graphs so I'm just going to duplicate that open it up I just delete all the small grasses are in it and let's move our tall grasses into that update it's named tall grass okay so everything should be the same you can see now we're getting like taller sort of instances of it if we want to like separate it we can like change it to be the box I don't really like doing object in here just because it takes so long to load in our viewport and it'll like really like bag down they're seeing quite a bit so when there's gold you here actually bring our live viewer back in I don't think we need any more viewport right now and let's start a render you I said make things been done anything take a second update and yeah by default it's gonna be like absolute mayhem um so we wanted to for the long grass is make like nice little leg pocket of the long grass showing up so that one we overlay it on top of our small grass it gives it nice variation rather than like right now we're getting tall grass everywhere and sort of that sort of kills like the nice realism and like variance or our scenes so with that let's go to our distribution tab here for it actually how come okay this is weird little glitch thing so with tall grass in general I usually like to keep the normal height a little bit lower and then most of it will be through our scale here so let's go down into our scale and so with tall grass what we want is a little bit more of little island pockets so we'll make that with this noise you do that let's increase our low clip a bit here and you can see we're starting to get a little bit more black regions a suit brings up and then what we can do is lower our brightness overall you see now we're starting to get some pockets of that high grass right now are the seed for our army the seed for our high grass or tall grass and our small grass is the same so let's give this guy some variation just so it's not growing all in the same spot take a second update and with this in general let's increase the global scale to like 200 or so just sort of getting like bigger regions all tall grass but then we're also still getting like bigger regions of where it won't be showing you I was starting to look pretty good let's just lower this a little bit or now let's turn off small grass just over isolating where our tall one is growing you can see now we're getting nice like regions of the tall grass and we can like play with this a little bit more maybe choose a different one maybe go with the UM the wavy turbulence or getting like the nice little sharp regions so we getting like nice like shadowed areas that you can see now and then like I'll fade off so help create like realistic like little like clusters of grass I'm gonna play with like the seed until you get like something you want you so with the tall grass that's actually lower our account quite a bit here we just need to count for our small grass up quite a bit just so we can get that nice ground coverage now we can use this tall grass a significantly lower account to get like the detail grass that you can say going on interesting on our small grass again you and you concede now we're getting a nice sort of like realistic feel with our graphs here it's actually like isolate this little region let it render out a little bit you you can see with like the ground variation of our displacer and like the nice like regions I like the tall grass and stuff we're getting a nice sort of like realistic-looking ground especially when we're like blending in are sort of like rocky air patches so you can see how that really creates a nice and lateral natural look in our scene now let's take a little rendered a little pocket of like a render down here I like words like even like sparse and stuff it still feels pretty natural overall so one thing you'll notice is like even though we turned our transmission way down we're still getting that nice like soft feel from the grass because there's so many um singular blades of grass that are like bouncing the light around monkey cells with the global illumination and that helps sort of like I guess you could say like fake that Tressler like transmission feel to like the grass overall but then we're still getting like the nice like shadowed areas here okay so one thing I actually noticed in our scene is I forgot to [Music] I just our soil mid-level for the displacement and so that's making a lot of our grass actually spawn underneath our ground because our entire ground is getting lifted up so that's the just er mid-level to like 23 or so and you can see the now a lot more of our grass is able to show through and then we can adjust our grass material accordingly I think all the other materials will be probably fine just because these things are the shortest ones in our scene into our grass shader here and we can slower this a bit our brightness so push it back into being to where we want but our grass is actually growing to where it should be now you okay so the next step more or less what I like to do with my grass overall is boost the saturation for it and give it a little bit more variation overall even though we're getting like a lot of variation with like sort of like dead and live grass I really like to like push that a little bit more and so let's go about and do that and this only really works if we're using the scatter systems or like the cloner and stuff so that's why we set that up first before we went back into our material and added that in so for now let's just turn off our small grass just a little bit lighter on our render and let's dock this hmm maybe though respect that okay so let's bring off our material and kill about and so this is where we'll start to get a little bit more complex with our shaders rather than just plugging in our sort of default textures so to get the variation effect we're going to use a node called random color I can find it here it is and what this does is it assigns a random color from like white to black like red to blue like everything with like a float three value but will for this will only need like the white to black information and mobile you what we'll use it in conjunction with is with like the mixed note and a couple color correction notes let's bring those in and so what will do is tell like each random instance to either pick up like a more greener more green grass or like a more yellow grass so let's plug our random color into a mount let's plug our color corrections into the two textures and our albedo into those and then let's plug this guy into the three connections and then make sure you like plugging it into your transmission like with the color correction notes so it's still picking up like the the new colors or it's receiving and then lowering it to the correct brightness we want okay so with this sort of little setup here let's go into our color correction nodes and for my grass in general I'll usually like to have them a little bit more saturated just by default so you can see as I bring up the saturation it's getting nice little like bit of a greener feel to it even know like with like the photoscan textures and stuff I'm not after like something like super like realistic I just want something that's more or less pleasing to look at you so it feels like a little bit better overall let's move it a little bit over here I know I'm actually gonna isolate this little region okay so let's go into our first color correction note and you can see now and I like lower the hue significantly you and bring it up significantly now we're getting like areas I'd like the blue and then like areas of the purple what we're gonna do is something super subtle it's like just bring it into positives barely and bring it into the negatives just barely and this just helps like vary up the grass a little bit more we're getting a little like on the red side we're getting a little bit maybe too dark so on the unlike the dead side I guess you could say like the more yellowish I'll bring my gamma down a little bit which will brighten it up it'll also increase the saturation a little bit and that helps us sort of create like a little bit of a brighter brighter dead grass here such a bringing quite a bit more saturation maybe not so right something like that then over here let's see how far to the green we can go you No you you and this let's lower a little bit I think it's putting told it to afar into the Reds okay something like that looks pretty good you yeah okay so also like to do with my grass is like the the small grass is usually like a younger grass I'll usually have that a little bit more green and then our tall grass I'll have a little bit more like yellow and like sort of like dead so to do that let's duplicate this thatch grass let's change this first one to the small flash grass and let's change this one to our tall all right so on our tall grass here let's grab our six nodes and change it to be the tall grass you all right so with this we'll have to have both on just so we can like compare against each other and and then in the tall grass let's go and instead of in the positives here will more or less keep it as default let's bring up the gamma our lower the gamma but still it's a little bit brighter when you see we're starting to get like little pockets let's bring this back right up and you can see now we're starting to get pockets of like the dead grass where like our tall grass lives and then our younger grass our sort of small grass shader is still nice and green and you see it like how like nice this looks now let's even push this one maybe a little bit more but too much though we don't want to go to red yeah so lately it looks pretty good now we test it over here but oops you you you maybe a little bit too red let's put it 2-0 eggs maybe this one's five yeah if we want we can go into our small grass here and put it to be even less so towards the yellow so we're still getting a little bit a little bit of yellow but not enough I reckon that's some pretty good you yeah I'm liking that a lot actually okay you

Channel: calder moore

Views: 18,778

Rating: 4.9480519 out of 5

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Id: evgiQIPFiw8

Length: 73min 3sec (4383 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020