Grass with SketchUp

[cotty]

Inspired from the carpet topic I started some tries to use this technique for grass generation. Some nice examples of nature objects are in the gallery, so this simple example can only be a startpoint for further investigations and improvements. I hope that some other SketchUp users try to do so and show their results (renders and models ) here in this topic?!

I attached my example model for this purpose ...

[Voytech]

Looks promising for a simple arch viz render... Thanks.

[cotty]

Whaat explains his improved grass technique in this topic:

http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... 67#p115167

Cotty

[Nickster]

Hi Cotty,
I tried using this grass component and wanted to render it in Indigo. First of all when I import the grass component into my model and try using the Fur plugin, even with density setting to a low number as 5 and hitting the make crowd button, it halts, and either kick me out of the program or you would see the blue idle circle just turning forever. What settings do you use? Also in the rendered picture of the house with grass, how do you keep the component not to cross the border line?
Thanks so much in advance,

[cotty]

Hi Cotty,
I tried using this grass component and wanted to render it in Indigo. First of all when I import the grass component into my model and try using the Fur plugin, even with density setting to a low number as 5 and hitting the make crowd button, it halts, and either kick me out of the program or you would see the blue idle circle just turning forever. What settings do you use?

Do you use the original component or a very simple dummy to use the fur-plugin?

Also in the rendered picture of the house with grass, how do you keep the component not to cross the border line?
Thanks so much in advance,

I didn't do it

[Bosseye]

Might as well add my grass in here then - 2 simple componants textured using the summer grass material from the database, one made darker one made lighter for colour variety, then just dummied around using the fur plugin. Works well enough for me

Perhaps someone can have a think about my question I asked in whaats thread though: I create my main grass component called 'GRASS'. If I create fur using this component, then poly count is around 40,000. Obviously scene is too heavy and very slow to rotate etc. So I create a single line, make it a component called 'GRASS_dummy' and scatter the dummy component around with the fur plugin. However, poly count remains at 40,000 and the model becomes too heavy to rotate again, even though the scene is displaying just the single line component? Is that correct? Or am I going wrong somewhere, as I don't understand how single lines can have the same poly count as the original component.

I get round it at the moment by simply putting the fur grass on a different layer which is only switched on to render a view, but it bothers me

And just for fun (an old one, ignore the rubbish house), you can scatter little components around with the fur plugin and then move up to look as if they're sat on the grass to be flowers, fallen petals, leaves whatever.

[Whaat]

Nice result!

As far as your question goes, I do not understand why you would have some much trouble orbiting a scene made up of thousands of single line components. From my experience, the performance is much improved. However, 40,000 line components is quite a bit. Most of my scenes probably have more like 20,000 or less. Once you reach a certain limit, I imagine performance will take a hit, even with single line components. Very strange that the polycount doesn't drop. That makes no sense at all!

[galinette]

And just for fun (an old one, ignore the rubbish house), you can scatter little components around with the fur plugin and then move up to look as if they're sat on the grass to be flowers, fallen petals, leaves whatever

The house is simple and not very detailed indeed, but grass, vines, tree and envmap mood are insanely impressing.

[Nickster]

@ Cotty- Thanks for the reply. I used the original component.

@ Bosseye- Looks really nice. If only the script could be re-written to limit the growth to the borderlines, that would make a much nicer effect. The grass looks nice and all, but you can see grass growing out of concrete walkways. Has anyone ever asked him to rewrite the Fur script or is it that hard to do? I am not a programmer so I don't have a clue. At any rate, a nice scene.