grass in XSI

[wurp]

Hi

I just made an experement with grass.
I made a few simple straws out of low polygon cones, and the applied a material and a bend modifier to each one of them. After that I duplicated them up to make the grass. After that i selected all of the straws and typed in r(number) in each of the transformation textboxes to add randomnes to the grass, and here is the result:

This isnt a very good method as it takes up a lot of memory and is overall slow, so I was wondering if anyone else found out a way to make grass in XSI? maybe with the hair system?
Also, is there a way to randomly duplicate objects over a surface in XSI?

[pnoizat2]

I had a small test with the hair system. only a preliminary investigation so far but it seemed really solid, (there are apparently plenty of hair bug fixes in 2.02, currently it doesnt shade properly on the dark side of a sphere for example.)

all i did was replace the default hair colours with greens. but there is plenty of scope for subtlety. eg textures driving grass colours, paint weights controling length etc. I also added wind and other forces to it, all animated fine.

i havent yet tried making grass as low lying and random as yours. As the system interpolates between control hairs, im not sure about the level of randomness between control points.

perhaps you could use some of your current approach (you can also tell hair to render as geometry) for the foreground if you want to get really close.
hair system for the midground and straight textures/ displacement maps for the background.

all good clean fun.
good luck
Te Anau

[agardner]

the engine interpolates the guides, but you can then put displacements on that result - ie 'tipfrizz' should do the trick

[pnoizat2]

thank you joealterinc......
damn i love this forum!
straight from the horses mouth.
Love your hair system. thanks

Te Anau