5
$\begingroup$

I'm trying and failing to get a procedural texture to emulate this real life grass. The "grass" purchasable packs are not much use, as they're not so very tight cut as this is. It will be too big an area for actual hair modelling of the blades.

Anyone here a nodes whizz that can get close with bump and colour?short grass image

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
5
  • $\begingroup$ If using Cycles you could try material displacement otherwise fake it with bump mapping $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Jun 16, 2020 at 11:44
  • $\begingroup$ Needs to be in Evee, and faking it with bump mapping is the question I'm asking "how to do?" $\endgroup$
    – dwbell
    Commented Jun 16, 2020 at 11:57
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ so you want it completely procedural, neither image texture nor hair particles? $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Commented Jun 16, 2020 at 12:18
  • $\begingroup$ Voronoi texture seems to be the closest thing, but texturing results alone are bland at best. With a short hair particle added into the mix it does work better though $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Jun 16, 2020 at 12:23
  • $\begingroup$ Ideally procedural, yes. Would like to see a hair particle solution demonstrated, the can determine if my system can handle it over a hole green. $\endgroup$
    – dwbell
    Commented Jun 16, 2020 at 12:38

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5
$\begingroup$

Ok, here is my attempt at a "tight grass green" shader. However, I worked on this for a while, before realizing that I should have looked at the reference photo more, because mine doesn't look as similar as I thought it did. Mine looks more "mossy". However, I'm not sure how much closer I could have gotten in the time I had even if I was trying to be more true-to-the-picture. The point of this is that I show how I would (start) going about making a shader of this sort.

Instead of uploading dozens of photos with lengthy descriptions, I will post my whole .blend file so you can see/play with it yourself. It is not perfect - obviously, it does not look exactly like the grass you showed in the picture - now that I think about it, no reputable golf course would allow their greens to fall into such a state of disrepair. The "wear and tear" can be fixed relatively easily I think by just adjusting the brightness of the colors.

Just a couple of things to note - There are 2 sets of musgrave textures in each group. The reason I do this is that musgrave is good at creating a fine grit, but it comes with the cost of large dark blobs among it. Fortunately, with a little tweaking, you can isolate those dark blotches and subtract them from the main image to leave just the grit. That's why I did that.

Secondly, the texture might not have as much relief (height) as you might want, however, the "tightness" of the height information is such that too strong a normal strength just makes things too noisy. I know this can be mitigated by isolating the texture that goes to the normal map and "blurring" it slightly, however I do not have unlimited time to play with it.

Lastly, because of this "noisy normal", this shader can be a bit of a performance hog. Again, this can be mitigated by the same method I mentioned above.

Have a look, play with the values, and I hope you at least find SOMETHING helpful.

The setup and the final product looks like this:

GrassImage

File is here -

Cheers

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ Awesome stuff. Thank you very much. I certainly have found "sorting helpful" especially the musgrave blotch removal technique. Thanks for the time and the blend file! $\endgroup$
    – dwbell
    Commented Jun 17, 2020 at 7:45
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Hey, no problem. To be honest, looking now, I think I might like the look of Timaroberts answer a bit better - mine is to "weather beaten". Regardless, you've both inspired me to play with the node editor some more to see if I can make it even better - just a personal challenge. If I come up with anything cool I'll post it here - if just to serve as yet another example of a grass shader. $\endgroup$
    – Christopher Bennett
    Commented Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58
3
$\begingroup$

Here's a procedural try,

enter image description here click to enlarge

This basically works around combining noise, and voronoi textures. The idea behind the material is to mask between the major color groups present in the reference, then use the mask as a displacement map as well. This seemed to work fairly well with the setup shown below, and should at the least be a place of experimentation to begin with.

Here is the node tree:

enter image description here click to enlarge

Of course, the file for those interested.

Improve this answer
$\endgroup$
2
  • $\begingroup$ This looks super promising! Thank you very much. Am digging into it now. $\endgroup$
    – dwbell
    Commented Jun 17, 2020 at 11:02
  • $\begingroup$ They both look brilliant! Shame they keep crashing in my version of Blender (3.3) $\endgroup$
    – Akeel Ahmad
    Commented Apr 18, 2023 at 19:22

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .