Realistic looking Grass without using grass

[FrankThomas]

Trying to get surface shaders to look more like grass without having to use the grass objects and having a render time in weeks

What'd you think ? (ignore the wierd circle thing - I seem to get that a lot on fractal terrains)

[littlecannon]

I think your getting there... maybe darken the grass slightly, as it looks a bit cartoony. Have you tried turning down the Gamma correction in your render settings, then cranking up the exposure in the camera settings? This may stop your scene looking so flat (excuse the pun).

[Tazato]

I like it, but the grass looks more like a golfcourse or astro turf than actual grass that you would find out on a hill. a little darker and it would look great.

[FrankThomas]

I'm going to be doing a fair bit of playing around with grass and stuff soon so I'll see what I can come up with.  Might have to be a combination of a grass population and some surface shaders etc.

[jmaurer]

hey frank not bad - main thing really is that it is too saturated in color and needs more variation. Try dropping the sat value of the color by 1/4 and then layer in like 3 or 4 different colors of green, that all vary slightly in hue and value.

[FrankThomas]

That's kind of what I did - I have 3 shaders - Dark, mid and light but I think I need to play around with the saturation/fractal breakup to get it looking a bit better

[FrankThomas]

Tried a different tack.  Picked a nice shade of green then plugged a power fractal into the colour.  I reckon it looks ok but let me know what you think

[RealUser]

Looks better, but needs some more variations respectively layers. And put some brownish colors in it.

[swiftstream]

I've been playing with this for a render I'm working on (see the grass surface in this post), using a technique similar to Frank's (with a power fractal). However, I changed the power fractal to use green as the "high color" and yellow as the "low color" so that you get some tonal variation, not just variation in brightness. I would also suggest a smaller scale for the power fractal than in your last render--as much as 5x-10x smaller. Finally, I used another small-scale power fractal as a displacement map, which I think makes the effect considerably more convincing.

[FrankThomas]

That looks better than mine.  I'll have to give it a go when I get home

(so many things to try - so little time to render )

[rcallicotte]

You were heading in a great direction.  How does it look now?

Tried a different tack.  Picked a nice shade of green then plugged a power fractal into the colour.  I reckon it looks ok but let me know what you think

[FrankThomas]

it doesn't look so bad from a distance especially if you use a bit of vertical displacement on the layer - about 0.25 or so which makes it look a bit spiky.  Close up, it looks horrible there must be a source of 3D grass objects that are in a .obj format somewhere but I'm damned if I can find 'em

[ozijon]

hi nice stuff but grass isnt really green as in a sence use green with more of a brown in it and mix with yellow and itll come up more grassy looking