Hey, so I’ve been working on my first nature scene and I’m struggling on making my grass look good. I made 8 variations of grass including different colors, sizes, shapes and correctly applied them to the Particle System, but I ended with this very sad result:
I also know that there is The Grass Essentials Pack by BLender Guru, and they even give one for free and all but, I try to be as independent as I possibly can, that includes making my own grass, but I just don’t know how to pull it off.
Do I need actual textures, or is there a node trick or should I just go ahead with the Blender Strands? I’m a bit lost here, so anything is helpful!
Note: I’m new here, and under audit, so my apologies if this becomes outdated before it posts.
Well I’d say you are off to a good start. It doesn’t look bad. Now I haven’t played with grass just yet in Blender, but a couple things come to mind when I see your image:
The first thing I notice is a bit of a cross hatching pattern. Many strands appear to be leaning far left or right. Try minimising the randomness factor here a bit.
The ground seems a bit dark, creating a harsh contrast, compounding my first observation.
By nature scene, I’m assuming you aren’t going for the look of a well kept lawn. Try giving the ground some subtle variation in height. If a lawn IS what you are going for, then 2 thumbs way up!
As for materials, It might help to see how they react under natural lighting. Throw an hdr sky map in the background. I have a feeling this will go a long way to subduing and naturalizing the tones, also helping the the above mentioned observations.
You may need to add some translucency as well as some SSS. Also, a good way to get randomly leaning and rotated strands is to have the objects be instances of hair particles, not regular emission particles.
