vegetation test

[Dune]

I really need to make a library of procedural vegetations for more distant viewing, so I started out doing some wet heathland with lots of low grass and some patches of blooming heather.
Not perfect yet, but good enough to post, I think.

Update...

Update...

[DocCharly65]

Idyllic atmosphere. Great Ulco!

[Jokes]

Wow, I love it so much! It looks very real!

[fleetwood]

All looking very good. Really like the last one .

[bobbystahr]

If only I wasn't colour blind...odd thing is I see it very much like y'all but trying to do subtle colouring like this is and likely always will be, beyond me. Bloody lovely Ulco....your painting background is showing...good stuff.

[Mr_Lamppost]

Good stuff 

The third one looks most real but the broken up water in the first gives a better impression of "Marshy"

[AP]

The impression of various grasses looks fairly good there. Everything but the trees is fully procedural?

[masonspappy]

The third one looks most real but the broken up water in the first gives a better impression of "Marshy"

Kind of thinking the same thing

[Dune]

I agree with you. In that render I raised the 'dry parts' a bit, and as that's a soft fractal, it also raised part of the wet area, producing the little humps. Not a very good way of handling the masking, but the result was nice.
The really far back is procedural trees, just a humpy rise and some dark greenish color, masked by distance shader, before that about 6 tree pops of 4 species and one grass pop inthe last render, taking the color of the ground. All displacements and colors are done after a base color node, so no compute terrain, easy in these kinds of renders.

[Mr_Lamppost]

Grass pop in the last one, I wondered but thought you may have done something clever with very tall thin fake stones.  I remember getting passable procedural grass that way years ago but didn't save the file and was never able to reproduce the good result. All later attempts had noticeable black displacement artefacts.

[bobbystahr]

Grass pop in the last one, I wondered but thought you may have done something clever with very tall thin fake stones.  I remember getting passable procedural grass that way years ago but didn't save the file and was never able to reproduce the good result. All later attempts had noticeable black displacement artefacts.

I find the procedural grass preset to be very adjustable and handy for distant veggies....

[zaxxon]

Lovely trees and light! The last one (as you might expect) with the grass population is my preference. Was there any hit on render time?

[Dune]

I think render times were about the same; about 25 minutes, at 0.6 and AA6, soft shadows 0.5 and 5 samples.
@ Mr.Lamppost: I did use some 'procedural grass' effect also, just one, dense (2), no color fake stones layer of size 0.005 and height 1 or so. I too find that if you increase height to 10, you also get more nasty black artifacts, and it's really important to have high detail settings to have a proper grass effect then. I might try it again with more extreme settings or a double layer of 'fake grass', see what happens. Adding a Lambert shader for some translucency (or a default shader as base) may get you some softer light 'through' that grass.

[Dune]

A comparison between different sets op fake stone grass. All crop took 2min each, the detail 0.8 crop 25 seconds longer.
Low and sparse meaning 5 high and 0.8 density, 2xhigh meaning 2 shaders in line, each 10 high, high20sparst meaning height 20  and 0.5 density....

[bobbystahr]

good tests, 2xfakegrasshigh.jpg (95.81 kB, 3 works best to my colourblind eyes