Grass & Flowers with Hair
Hair – by: base80
January 24th, 2006
This is the result of my very first tests with the demo of Hair. Grass and Flowers.
In this tutorial I’ll try to explain how to make flowers with Hair. It is a bit tricky to try to explain this in a short tutorial and results may not be the same for everyone.
Follow up:
Lets get started with a plane or a relief object with 20×20 segments.
With the object still selected hit Add Hair. Change its name to “Grass”.
Duplicate this Hair and call it “Stems”.
Go to the settings of Grass and set the length to 50.
Go to the settings of Stems and set the number of roots to a low value (49 in my case) and in the Hairs tab set Roots to “As Guides”
(Side-note 1: Guides are not rendered, Hairs are)
Now with Stems selected in the hierarchy hit Add Hair. This will add hair on the stems. We need to set the position and direction of those hairs. As they are supposed to be flowers we set Root to Guide Tip in the guide tab and in the Hairs tab too.
We need to set a growth direction in the guides tab, either set it to Random or to Direction Y, and check Local.
Well done we are half way. we have our basic model.
(Side Note 2; sometimes the stems will not be planted randomly in the field, i noticed the when you set the numbers of roots to 1 and back to a higher number it regenerates the guides in a random way.)
Ok lets get to the textures. The grass texture can have whatever effect you want. But the texture making the stems of the flowers can not have kinks and such because the flower has to sit on top of the stem. The stem texture needs more thickness at its tops too.
The flower texture is just whatever comes up, check a lot of options and watch what happens.
The result of this Hairy method is a field of flowers that looks great at a certain distance. Personally I like it a lot that each flower looks different, some are even eaten by raging insects.
As I said earlier the results you get may differ a lot from my results. Some fiddling around with settings will get you where you want.
Some of my early test in the demo.
