Comments for mrProxy Grass at http://www.mrmaterials.com , comment 1 to 35 out of 20 comments http://www.mrmaterials.com Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:44:15 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-1736 Thanks Jeff - Simon Carmona Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:34:47 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-1541 Hi Jeff. I'm not quite sure how the material is suppose to be mapped as I'm not getting similar results. Should the whole material (Patch 01,02,03) be applied to a patch of grass (1 proxy)? Should the material be applied so that a grass blade has a dark green base and then is light at the top, with the streaks running horizontally? Thanks - Elaih Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:43:50 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-990 Hi Jeff... awesome stuff here... the grass nemesis hath been defeated, thanks for your insight!! It gives me hope to get away displacement! I have a question though that I hope you can give some advice on the best way. I have rolling hills (plane + FFD) that i'd like to populate with grass patches (perpendicularly to the face, corner to corner). I'd like to take the square patches and tile them, maybe with some rotation 90deg at random for variation. Okay noob I know, I've tried advanced painter, it had no auto scatter that I can see. Peter watje's plug-in seems to have issues doing this, even with bounding box collisions and even spacing, it seems to double up on geometry, and max scatter doesn't accept mrProxy objects. I've even tried scattering and dummy object using particle systems and replace with proxy using a script. In short is there a was to make 10 different grass squares made in grassomatic --> proxy them, and chess board scatter them on a piece a geometric terrain, randomly rotating the proxies to give a random look? I'm quite sure i'm overlooking a simple thing here, I hope so. Any advice you can give me would be most welcomed, because I saw your images and you seem to have it down!! Thanks! - Andrew Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:31:29 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-966 There are several ways to scatter objects, all with unique settings/methods. If you're going to use the scatter plugin then I would recommend doing the proxy tree scattering tutorial that ships with 3ds Max. It seems to do a good job of explaining the process & scatter plugin settings. - Jeff Patton Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:47:24 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-961 Hi Jeff ....(and the rest of you guys ) Maybe i missed this reading through the posts, but i would like to know what settings you are using when scattering the proxy ? (As this is my first post here, i would like to thank you for the great effort here ) - Soeren Staermose Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:48:41 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-875 jeff, Are you sure there is no sss in this material? Its one hell of a shader man. The color gradients are really good. It also nice because I can just change the subs to a brown/yellow for a more fallish look. Tis the season! Thanks again. - Grant Noonan Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:05:48 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-870 Jeff, you are the greatest! I really appreciate you uploading this. Im serious about the cookies, they're killer! - Grant Noonan Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:59:28 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-856 Uploaded the material here:[url]http://mrmaterials.com/resource-central.html?func=fileinfo&id=987[/url] - Jeff Patton Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:34:20 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-855 @Herb - Glad to hear the info was/is helpful. @Grant - I think I'm closing in on a grass material. Example (click to enlarge): [URL=http://jeffpatton.net/Tests/Grass_test.jpg][img]http://jeffpatton.net/Tests/Grass_test_thb.jpg[/img][/URL] Now I just need to figure out the best way to display it here. Obviously it doesn't look right applied to the current matlab objects. - Jeff Patton Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:39:43 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-845 Hi Jeff this site is awesome. i have been searching for tips and trick for years and the one i just read about optimizing for proxy rendering blew my mind. i tried 80 instances of the proxy grass you supplied and it took 10 minutes to render, changed the BSP to BSP2 and turned off scanline and it took 33 seconds. i almost fell out of my chair. i can not wait to try this setting on future projects. thanks. - Herb Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:06:19 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-844 Sorry for the late reply Grant. I've been meaning to work on a decent grass material so I'll try to get something put up soon. (LOL @ the cookie comment) - Jeff Patton Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:24:50 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-810 Hey Jeff, any chance you could upload that lovely grass shader in your scene? My wife will bake you cookies. - Grant Noonan Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:06:18 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-658 Jeff is refering to this post he made earlier: http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/54-optimizing-your-scenes-for-mr-proxies.html Once I realized I wasn't following directions correctly I fixed my scene and now have 6000 instances rendering in 42 seconds. Thanks a ton Jeff. - Matthew Williams Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:26:57 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-652 My master jeff! can you share your material used in this test image? i really luv it... my e-mail cad_inho@hotmail.com thx in advance if you can... man i really like this idea of grass... very interesting.... - Hildevar Martins Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:40:36 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-651 Here's my take on it. Adv painter, mr proxy patch from grassomatic. Tree and sky are vue. 1 min render on dual quad core. Needs some variation, less manicured. When I get 2010 I'll try the muti-sub mr material on it but until then this will have to work. [url]http://www.creativeworkshopdesigns.com/images/grass.jpg[/url] - Danny Jones Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:34:03 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-650 Jeff , try Advanced Painter in randomizer mode, ist like painting grass :), at least to me, its very very good tool and really easy to use. Once you set up the proxy, its just click and paint till you think its dense enough. - Mariano Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:15:40 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-649 [i]"(What dimensions did you expect this to be?)"[/i] - As I described in my blog entry the patch of grass is 5'x5'. [i]"I tried 9 instances of the object and got a memory error/crash. (Design2010/32, WinP32, 3GB RAM"[/i] - I have no clue. I'm using a similar setup 32bit vista and the other day I rendered a scene with over 9000 instanced proxy grass objects without any problems. So I don't understand why some are encountering issues with memory errors unless you're not truly instancing the proxies or not following the proxy optimization tips I've described in previous posts. Also using the FastRasterizer can help for things like grass & hair. [i]"is there a way to "extract" the underlying geometry from the file you provided, or -better- is there a way to "open" the proxy and edit the root geometry?"[/i] - No, you can't edit the proxy geometry. However, it's a simple process to create your own grass patch geometry using the tools I described in my blog entry. This particular patch is too large to be scattered across lumpy terrain so you'll want to make your own smaller patch anyway for scattering on non-uniform geometry. Texture wise for the grass I'd use a gradient ramp with noise and the new Multi/Sub-Map in 2010 to randomly modify the colors. As mentioned earlier the SSS material would be great to use but on large grass areas it tends to fail or take a LONG time. Perhaps some simulated SSS by use of self-illumination would work, I haven't tried it yet, but in theory it should work. For the ground, I'd probably just use a dirt and/or grass texture map applied to an A&D material since it would be mostly covered by the grass. [i]"Its hard to believe that we havent something useful without 50 walkaround for this situation, i mean, we need a good shader for grass since ever.. the translucency problem.."[/i] - Maybe there's a custom mental ray shader "out there" that would work well. I'll have to look around at maxplugins.de to see. [i]"There is one big flipped face which renders black. Not that bad if u sink it in ground plane not visible especially in perspective view."[/i] - No idea, I don't have that problem here with this proxy object. [i]"The thing that i have problem with is if u dont scatter it but if u try to build a grid based surface with instancing or coppying this proxy object proxy_s will rotate around z axis for 45 degrees hence u will get 45 degrees chessboard where every second field is empty in other words u need two times as much instances in order to cover a field, since this is going to turn itself into a RAM_predator it would be nice to try and resolve this issue."[/i] - Afraid I don't totally understand the question here. I do realize there is a pattern that will appear if you don't rotate this particular proxy object when scattering though so I would recommend rotating it. You could also use this supplied proxy (or similar) object as a base layer and then scatter a different proxy (perhaps some smaller/taller clumps of grass) on top of this and that would help break up any patterns that appear. I need to look into some more scatter tools to see if we can make this scatter process easier/faster. Maybe something like GroundWiz from gugila.com would work better. - Jeff Patton Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:39:00 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-648 Jeff, this is my first post here so i feel nead to thank u for incredible work. The grass proxy stuff thing There is one big flipped face which renders black. Not that bad if u sink it in ground plane not visible especially in perspective view. The thing that i have problem with is if u dont scatter it but if u try to build a grid based surface with instancing or coppying this proxy object proxy_s will rotate around z axis for 45 degrees hence u will get 45 degrees chessboard where every second field is empty in other words u need two times as much instances in order to cover a field, since this is going to turn itself into a RAM_predator it would be nice to try and resolve this issue. i have made a grid of 5x5 which in metric measurements is around 22mx22m and it could go further on my machine (i is going to list specs at the end) with 1/16 anti aliasing and FG draft mode on 640x640 pixel took 2 and a half min to render which is good potential. Since nobody else called this one as a thing that happens it must b my mistake, it would b nice to get an answer. Thankz in advance k spes: vista business, intel quad core 2ghz 64bit bus, 4gb ram, quadro fx2700 512mb RAM max2009 - kudu Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:57:49 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-645 Very cool - lots of potential! I "unRARed" the three files using the free 7-Zip into one .mib file of about 60mb and an image file of grass (with a black border). (I'm not in front of my 3d machine, so I apologize if I'm mis-remembering some of this) Issue 1) I created a new file with a new mrproxy object and used the "..." button to point to the downloaded file. The image file shows up in the window in the rollout. When I render, I get all the geometry with the app assigned object color. (What dimensions did you expect this to be?) So far so good. I've messed around a bit with adding a color/texture to the grass with so-so results. Also, it seems that the grass mrproxy needs to be on top of a "dirt" base that peeks through between the grass. I'd love some semi-noob suggestions on the texture to be applied to the grass geometry and the dirt surface texture. It seems that "near" needs translucency, etc. and "far" can tolerate a much more simple texture. I'm checking out the Vizdepot thread to see if I can follow that... Issue 2) I tried 9 instances of the object and got a memory error/crash. (Design2010/32, WinP32, 3GB RAM( While all that geometric detail really is great when the camera is within a few meters of the grass, I'd like to try this technique with even further simplified geometry. is there a way to "extract" the underlying geometry from the file you provided, or -better- is there a way to "open" the proxy and edit the root geometry? Regardless - thanks very much for your hard work on this really useful and important issue! An aside: for anyone who hasn't seen this, here's a potentially useful approach: http://3dsmaxrendering.blogspot.com/2008/05/ultimate-mental-ray-grass-shader.html - Tom Donalek Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:17:20 +0100 http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/101-mrproxy-grass.html#comment-626 Here is the URL.. [url]http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=11305[/url] - Mariano Sun, 31 May 2009 02:40:25 +0100