An excellent job. I'm voting for Number 2 so far. It looks the way a
recently-seeded lawn looks as it starts to sprout in the spring.

A quick look at the Corbis reference images reminded me of just how
surprisingly green grass actually is, especially early in the year. It
doesn't seem to bend in any single direction unless the wind is very
strong. In scale it can be rather more thin than memory would have it,
and there's usually a great variation in blade height in any unmown
grass. Long grass can be branchier and more tuft-like than one would
think. In the Midwest US where I live, I've noticed that wild fields of
grass (up close) have much variety of texture and species, lots of
little sticks and brush and weeds sticking up, etc-- clutter, in other
words. All on top of mats of dried matter from previous seasons: the
dirt almost never shows through in a wild field.

I'm sure you've run up against the biggest issue in creating CG grass:
creating
enough bejillions of blades to approximate nature. Limitations of memory
and processing time tend to see to it that the blades must be much
sparser than in a real field, which is so jammed with life that even
from a short distance the grass looks like fuzz. I've often thought that
individual blades may be best for the parts of the scene that are in the
foreground and middle-near, while some other method (one or more layers
of variagated procedural texture?) be used for the background. Sometimes
height-dependent background textures seem tempting, as color and
lushness often vary with moisture levels.

All in all: nice stuff.

DZ



Rune wrote:

> In which of these two images does the grass look more real?
>
> 1: http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/3d/include/fgrass.jpg
>
> 2: http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/3d/include/fgrass2.jpg
>
> ...and why? ...and what can be improved?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Rune

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