I mainly do archviz renders, and good grass is difficult to create and has very big impact on exterior scenes.
There are several ways how to create grass for final image, but most beatiful and amazing is true 3D grass with visible blades and light dancing on it... Most easy and fast how to make it is special material. Very good example is Vray - it is used mainly for archvizs, so it have two possibilities: 1) Renders huge amounts of polygons veeery fast and without heavy RAM usage and 2) has new Fur shader. It is simple shader without many options but can do its purpose very well. Unfortunatelly I havent new Vray, so I only saw how it works, but I have new Octane
I use Sketchup or Archline or Allplan (long time ago) for creating 3D, and this kind of apps dont have and will never have grass modelling.
I can export to Blender or C4D and create grass there, but for example C4D has hair module only in the most expensive pack. And integrating this apps to my pipeline between (e.g) Sketchup and Octane would only make problems - like more I/O issues to solve.
Another thing is that rendering Blender or C4D grass without creating mesh can be done only in the same app - Blender or C4D.
So only 3D option how to create true grass for me is to make it in Blender and somehow (I dont know how by now) export it as polygons via OBJ to Octane. BUT this will create huge mesh and polygon count with big impact on VRAM and speed I suppose.
Another option is make fake gras... only a few planes with texture at some places... But this is so time consuming and doesnt look good - texture doesnt fit often to rest of grass areas etc... And I dont like fake solutions
Last option is to make blades in post production in Gimp of Photoshop. But it has disadvanteges too and not easy.
Of course I can use texture
, but it looks bad, especially on boundaries, and even great texture and scale wont save it.I want to ask: Is there any way how Octane can help in making grass? Will be there something like hair/fur/grass shader in future? It doesnt have to have many options, only a few. Anyone who wants make complex hair simulation with dynamics and hair styles will use Blender, C4D or Modo, I think, and will export only a few heads
, not biig gardens of hairs .Thanks,
Tomas
