Any tip to create a good meadow with grass and flowers?

[Anonymous]

Hello.

I see that MAYA has in the Content Browser great brush strokes with all kind of wonderful grasses but, they are valid only for first planes and a few instances, not for huge and vaste meadows.

I've tried with the painting FX, with the XGen and lately with MASH and the standin of a little portion of converted to polygon FX painted grass and...Uff, it's hard so hard that I still have been able to create the wonderful meadows that with only 5 clicks I created with iTooForest & 3DSMAX.

Any advice or tip?

Best regards.

[lee_griggs]

You can use XGen splines for grass.

[Anonymous]

But, why do I fear that if the meadow is more than 1mx1m will overload my system and cause a crash to MAYA?.

I will try it later because I need it.

Thank you Lee, as usual.

[lee_griggs]

This from the tutorial:

• It is good practice to lower the Percent value in the Preview/Output tab before continuing. If the Percent value is too high, you may find that your computer will stall due to a large number of primitives generated.

[Anonymous]

I've been doing some modest test and it's satisfactory. Only one thing: if I want to modify the form of the terrain (plane) and create some hills sculpting it, I think that the grass blades don't grow from the modified plane, they grow (still) from the former planar plane.

And if I scale the original plane (starting from your tutorial) in order to resize it to a plane of 50m x 50m the blades of grass don't extent fully to it , only partially. I tried to modify some scales and dimensions trying to see if they were what I need to modify but only extended to some part of the whole plane.

Besides, the applying of the color variation didn't work for me...I inserted correctly the equation but didn't apply it.

Here you are a capture. the little cylinder is 1m height. The taller cylinder is 40m height and there's a distance of 56m from those two cylinders to the observer.

Thank you very much in advance Lee.

[lee_griggs]

If you click the 'Update XGen Preview' button (Eye icon) it should update the grass to the shape of the mesh.

[Anonymous]

Hello Lee: nope, it doesn't extend the grass creation to all the modified plane.

By the way: I need to know if the dimensions of this "little_cylinder" are 1cm if I selected as MAYA units cm. I suppose that this works like in 3DSMAX but I need to be sure of that because then this grass is smaller than 1cm (obviously this is not real) and the plane dimensions are 2.04m x 2.04m and I would like to arrive to 200m x 200m..

Here's the capture:

[Anonymous]

Hence according to that, if I change the measurement system to 1m per Maya's unit and I created another "little box" which is now 0.1m height, I changed the grass units to near ...What? unexpectedly the units measurement of the system (7 height x 0.6 width) doesn't match the xGEN ones which will force me to create a reference object like the "little box" in order to have the real relation of the grass with the rest of the real world.

I think that MAYA should change this.

And I still have problems with the color variation and the matching to the modified (sculpted) plane, because the grass doesn't extend to the rest of the plane.

[lee_griggs]

Sorry, I can only answer Arnold related questions here. Perhaps you could post these kinds of issues on the Maya forum.