Welcome to layering particle systems in blender.
In this video you will see the solution or at least my solution to the last lecture.
Use a series of particle systems to plant our various grass types and make sure we use low values during
prototyping to get a feel of how the grass will look.
So let's hop straight on over in a blender.
So I left you guys.
Here is some cones on a hill that's not quite grass.
So let's go over in to our fluffy bunny file and we had this one played the grass is grass plants plant.
So the first thing to do is on a nest it's under the ground plane itself.
So let's go to the ground plane would come and turn it on air we get.
And let's go ahead and add a particle system.
Now I'm going to start with probably the most common one which will be the grass short.
And I'm going to add a new particle system one and call it grass short.
And then once we've done that I'm also going to name it grass short here and this is going to be the
one that's going to cover all lots of the ground not absolutely everything if the grass ends up too
thick it doesn't look natural grass doesn't grow and suffocate itself.
So that's set up there.
I don't see any hairs as switch on smooth shading.
I make sure I am on the ground plane.
No I wasn't so aware of my on our applied grass short never mind will remove from there go to the ground
plain.
Add it in and select grass short it's got zero next to it of course because we've just removed.
It's only use a salad.
It's got no use for us.
So there's our grass short.
It's a hair and it's now going to be an object.
And at grass short excellence.
Now we've got that set up there as goes at the hair length to one and the size to one.
And it's starting to fill up our mesh.
But of course we don't want to leave it there.
What we'll want to do is have some children now set to the display of 10.
I'm going to leave it at a render of 10 as well that's probably going to be enough.
And I'm going to add some.
Randomness to it's changed asylum even going to up for random size can I make sure there's lots of fats
and random here.
Well I'm going to increase that significantly and I'm going to just change the threshold so he gets
some bits sticking out more than others.
About thirty three or thirty three.
Thirty five percent of the grass blades are now completely random or not random.
Are not random though we get the right way around.
OK.
So I'm going to leave it like that for the moment and start adding a nother.
Particle system.
So let's now go in and add another particle system I call that short grass I wasn't going to forget.
Rather short short grass okay.
Particle system too.
What shall we do next.
Do the medium m e d r u m medium grass.
Now of course here I'm going to borrow my short grass that we've already done all grass short can make
a unique user and immediately called it medium grass.
In fact under to rename the other one.
Just me being an analytical about it's all a shot.
S h.
Who are to grasp just what the other one is shortz.
No that's fine.
Okay so medium grass Let's go in and select here.
One of the medium grasses.
Excellent and we can see there's probably too many of those.
So I'm going to knock down the number here to maybe 200.
Starting to look quite nice.
Now I'm going to just go in straight away and add ourselves a virtex group.
I'm going to call it medium grass one.
Unhappy with the the base grass the short grass covering absolutely everything.
And I have medium grass to watch he wants to set these up.
I'm going to have the.
Grass short plants.
Grass shorts.
Plants.
Then there will be grass seed.
And there will also be grass.
See.
The plant itself.
So grass.
Plants.
Oh grass seed plants I know which one it is naming is very important.
I've got to remember if I come back to this in a few years time what I know what it means.
So let's go in and go to the medium grass which you're on at the moment.
Let's go to the particle system with the medium grass and turn on the density and select.
Medium grass one.
So that would just need to change once we've got this right we can just change a couple of values.
Now make sure we've got the right one selected.
So I have a habit of not checking before I plough forward switch ensue.
White paint and let's.
Are much better now you see here the number of cause of only highlighted a very small area.
But I'm going to turn off those.
There are only highlights of that small area there.
It's causing all of my grass.
The two hundred plus each one's got tense of the two thousand blades of grass are in that area there.
Now I'm going to put this type of short grass very sporadically over our ground there and dents are
over there now.
What we could do is arrange it where the camera is Bud Light to counter put it in up our entire scene
for the moment so I can move the camera around and find a good angle later on.
So I'm happy with that.
I'm going to go and add a new particle system.
I'm going to call this one medium grass too.
I'm going to borrow medium grass.
Make it his own.
Unique user.
And we've got a couple of things to change.
I'm going to change the virtex groups down to medium grass so I'm then going you know.
I am thing going to change the grass medium to grass medium too.
So that's those things changed.
And the virtex group we're going to go on to medium grass and I'm just going to do something ever so
slightly different as you can see the grass is coming in.
And as I paint more and more it will start to thin out.
So that's those ones done as well.
I'm quite happy with that.
I'm going to lower the number as well what we don't want is it to be too dense at this point in time.
Something lower that down to 5 I probably do the same with the other medium grass.
Now this obviously you can tinker with to your heart's desire I'm going to go for eight here of course
a lot of these have the same seed.
So I'm just going to even though they're not the same distribution I'm just going to change the seed
type on here.
There we go that shows you what's going on there.
And I think see the zero for that.
That one's absolutely fine.
Soon find out when it comes to rendering so we've got a couple more particle systems to make.
So let's add in.
Another one.
Let's do the grass seed one.
Gas seed grass seed.
There we go.
And again I'm going to borrow.
I'm going to borrow the hammer.
Where is it short.
One short grass down there.
And I'm going to reduce the number all the way down.
I'm literally going to go down to 200 or something along those lines maybe even less one hundred.
It's over the entire area which is fine children.
I'm going to go down to five children.
So there's not very many of these.
And we'll start to see them in a moment when I put on the grass seed not the plants but just the spots
the grass seed.
There we go.
And yet that all looks fine and it's all across the entire scene.
Now I'm going to see how this is starting to look a look through the camera to see what type of view
we've got.
Well the render would look absolutely hideous with that camera selected.
So let's go ahead and go up here.
Lock for camera to view that sumate spin round.
It's probably going to be a view something like that.
Let's change the before we go ahead and render.
Let's change the samples render samples currently at 100 I'm to lower it down to five.
So it's relatively quick it's going to take a while to compute some of those objects.
Then now we can start to see here that's the Hill ish you can see the hill.
That's not a big deal.
We probably need to increase the density of the base graphs because there's not enough of it but that's
why we render so we can go back in straightaway.
I think there's enough Tallgrass there so let's go and grab our short grass particle system and turn
that up to a thousand and see how that renders out.
That's taking a little longer and looks like it's going to be a little more dense.
Of course the lower samples it does mean that you are possible that you're going to get some black colourations
because obviously there's not enough samples to go through the object with light as you can see it's
taking a lot longer as well.
We'll end up with these dark patches right.
That's looking like we've got a decent amount of cover there I'm just going to stop the render.
I'm going to lower that down to 600 for the time being and we can play with these.
That's the great thing.
We can go backwards and forwards all day long.
Now can I add in a couple of our plants themselves.
But I'm going to put them in very specific locations.
So let's go ahead and hop into 3D view.
I'm going to hide the other particle systems first.
And I'm going to go over here and do both of these at the same time.
So the grass short plants only once that's around that area there that Sony put it on hills why not.
And the grass seed plants I'm going to make this brush a little smaller and pop some.
There some here some there one or two up on the top of the hill.
Perfect.
Now there are only going to be a few of those.
So with the particle system I'm going to create a new one and call it grass it's plants.
I'm going to set this one up manually rather than borrowing settings of any of the other ones.
So I wanted to off type hair now and change it straight away for the density here so be it.
Grass short plants.
That's the one we're working on too.
We can see the areas it's going to be in.
I'm going to turn off children.
I don't want any children on this so it is off by default.
Don't need a thousand of them.
Probably 50 maybe a little more than 50 to 200 in total.
And the hair length of one.
The objets is what we're going to use.
We're going to use grass short plant.
There we go.
And set the size to one here as well.
That looks good.
Apart from doesn't seem to be adhering much.
I think that's just.
And no it's not grass short.
Plants.
My painting the right one grass seed plant grass are just a naming.
In their grass short plants.
Excellent.
Is there another one down here.
We need grass up grass short plant grass seed plant.
That's why.
I've signed it to the wrong one or I've just misnamed things and not noticed.
Very easy to do with lots of things on Answer grass short plant.
That's the layout I want.
Now going to copy that into the next one.
So did I name it.
No.
So brass.
Go in here.
Grass short plants.
And then I'm going to borrow it in the particle system six grass short plants grass short plant.
Why can't I see it.
Is it further up.
Yes it is grass short plants.
And I'm going to call this grass seed plants and just scroll down probably even less.
This time some may be a hundred of them in total on the scene.
And I'm going to select the grass seed plant distribution.
Perfect.
So let's oh I haven't changed the object but the looks things.
Grass seed plants.
Okay that's probably too many.
Looks more like a field of corn rather than anything else.
So let's turn it down to 50.
And I want to bits more randomness in here.
So let's see if we can get anywhere with the random size.
That's a bit better.
We make it a bit smaller and of size only seems to make it smaller than what it was before.
So have I increased the size ever so slightly.
It will be larger.
Okay so let's spin back around to around here.
Let's turn on all the other layers themselves starting get a bit dense.
I don't know how long this is going to take to render has our world got an environment texture on it
has excellent can to be well lit.
Let's see how this turns out.
Of course what we should do at some point is also put the bunny back in the scene and let's line up
the camera with the bunny.
It's going to look something like that and render it out.
Let's see what it comes out like.
Okay.
Brilliant that has turned out rather well.
I'm liking how that is looking.
We've got a few tweaks that I can see straightaway to do.
Of course we're only at a very low sample rate at the moment and notice that took a minute and 45.
My laptop is no slouch but it's also not a complete power house so that's rendered out rather nicely.
I like the way it's turned out.
The grass looks quite natural.
Lying about here is a bit too much to grass.
Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing and where the tree is going to be which I think is going
to be somewhere around here probably wants to remove some of the grass from there.
She looks quite dense up there right.
So I'd love to see how your guys Meadow's are coming on.
Please show me how you're getting on in the discussions I'd love to see what sort of grass you've come
up with as well.
So I always run a bit short of time in these videos.
I'm just going to run through how I got to this stage a few extra bits that I've done obviously I've
covered in the dirt the ground with a diffuse colour and to do that I have gone to the ground plane
itself gone to the materials propertys and literally created a material I haven't named yet.
Called its soil for the moment.
So it's my soil material and I set it as a lighter colour.
Brown not too dark because the shadowing that's caused by the grass on top of it will usually be enough
to give us some darker soil as well.
Now you'll notice that between the last image you saw and this one here I've added a few extra details
and let's break them down.
Now I'm going to hop into the data properties here and you'll see I've added nothing with the ground.
Yeah.
Virtex group here that I've painted in I've added some extra grass around the rabbit itself to make
sure that it is covered up properly.
Perhaps a little bit taller grass there we could go for lots of different things.
Particle systems I've added that grass around the rabbit base as well and I used my short grass view.
So if we just go into the 3D view I can show you that.
So let's turn off everything.
Here are the bits we need.
Okay so I used our short grass across the entire scene.
I used the medium grass base over there.
This one over there the grass seed itself the long see that I spread it out very thinly across the entire
scene.
The grass short plant scattered all over the place.
But I also made it a tiny bit larger and put it around the rabbit base is welchs to make sure it was
fully covered up around there.
I could have probably painted that in a bit smooth but I did literally just dumped all the grass there
to make sure that the base was covered up.
And finally the grass seed plant will have scattered that about as well.
A few critiques of my final render or this isn't the final render but it was the render before the final
render.
And I've got the grass you can see through here I don't know whether that's a big problem or not but
it does highlight that the ground is super smooth and ground generally isn't super smooth like that.
So there's a couple of things we could make it undulate a bit more but I'm not too bothered at this
stage about that there's something we can always sort out later.
So how did you guys get on.
I'd love to see your field your meadows or your grass land that you've created.
Please share that in the discussions and I will see you guys in the next lecture.
Take care.