I wanna show you how to make very good looking grass with 3DS Max and Vray. I show you how to use Vray Fur and setting up the scene. I hope you enjoy.
Step 1:
Think about what you will need:
- A grass texture
- Maybe some sky?
Grass Texture:
Grass Texture, not from me but you can use it for private uses.
Sky:
Sky of our scene, not from me but you can use it.
Step 2:
Setting up the scene in 3DS Max. We will need a simple plane with the size of 350×350 and 32×32 segments.
Settting up the plane on which the grass will grow.
Then we will add a “Displace” modifier with “Noise” as map. I think a strength of 30 looks good.
The “Displace” modifier deforms our plane so that it looks more like a landscape…
Now we should add some sky to it. You can maximize the front viewport or you can press “F” to change to front view in the active viewport.
You see that the plane isn’t on the ground anymore:
Plane is higher than 0
To fix this just tick “Luminance Center”:
Now its back on the ground
Now we are able to add some sky. My sky picture is very long, so we have to create a plane that is very flat to compense that:
This is the sky
The plane should have a width of 350 and a length of 80. the segments are 16 for the length and 18 for the width. Now press “L” to switch to the left view and move the plane to the end of our ground plane:
That looks very good
Step 3:
It’s time to add some grass now. With our ground plane selected go to the “Create” tab and in the selector choose Vray:
You have to select Vray in the selector
Now you click on Vray Fur and something cool will happen:
There is our grass
Step 4:
Now we have to configure our grass, to get a better view press “P” to change to the “Perspective” mode and rotate your view using “Alt+Middlemouse+Moving”. The we should go into “Render Setup” and make some changes for a little preview render.
First scroll down adn open the “Assign Renderer” panel. Here choose “Vray Adv”:
Choose “Vray Adv” vray RT uses GPU instead of CPU but its not working fine…
Then press render and view the result:
Okay, we have some grass and some sky
It’s not looking very good. We have no sky and the grass is terrible. Let us create some materials:
First the sky. For the sky we can use a standard material only click add the small rectangle behind “Diffuse” and choose the image of the sky from this post (you have to save it on your comuter).
Choose Bitmap and then the sky picture
Choose your sky picture
The select the plane which is the sky and click assign to material. You should change from “Wireframe” to “Shaded” and click on “Show Shaded Material In Viewport”:
Select “Shaded” by clicking on “Wirefram” on the right upper sight of your viewport
Click this little buton to see the image in the scene
Again quick test render:
Nice! We have some sky
So, let us create a material for the grass. Again, just click on the small rectangle behind “Diffuse” and choose our grass texture.
Select the grass texture from this post
Then select the plane with the grass on it and the Vray Fur and click on “Assign Material To Selected”:
Assing to selected
Quick test render:
Looking better but the grass…
Just select the Vray Fur and go to “Modify” tab. Change the length to 20. Gravity to -1 and bend to 1. Thickness to 0,3 and taper to 1.0.
Use this settings
Then quick test render:
Not enough grass
It’s looking a lot more like real grass, but it’s not eough, it look’s like the hair of my grandpa. So change the “Distribution” to “Per face” and set it to 32:
If you plane was greater than mine you have to increase this value (double sied plane = double sized value e.g 64)
Test render:
Look’s very nice now
Step 5:
It’s time to finally adjust the render settings. We want a high resolution image and not only 640y480 pixels, so let’s edit the render settings:
1920×1080 means Full HD
And I know, you want to have this saved to a file. Scroll down to “Render Output” and click on “Files”. Then choose a destination to save the image. The filetype has to be bitmap (bmp):
Save the file anywher. You only have to remember where you saved it
When you click “Save” 3DS max is showing a dialogue just leave everything as it is and click “OK”:
It’s only for the compression of the image
Then hit render an wait. When the image is finifhed you will have the bitmap file in your destination in full resoulution 1920×1080 pixel:
3DS Max after rendering and saving the file
That came out of 3DS Max with Vray
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, if you have any questions, just ask in the comments. You can download the scene file in the “Downloads” section.
Have a nice day!
COBULLETRAIN 