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About a year ago, I created a general VRay Fur tutorial that you guys seem to like. We talked about all the different uses I had in mind for such a versatile widget.
There were.. a lot.
One of the most popular uses for VRay fur is creating Grass. Realistic grass tends to pack a lot of geometry and that can cause Sketchup to Lag and double the render time.
VRay offered a solution to that; the Fur widget acts very much like a Proxy widget.
It adds a simple weightless placeholder instead of thousands of blades of grass. The Grass itself though, only shows up when using VRay’s Interactive Render so you can edit it to your liking and then produce a final render with the results you want.
This makes the process of landscaping less lag-gy and very easy to control.
So let’s jump into Sketchup and see how we can create a realistic patch of grass with just a few minor tweaks.
Let me know your favorite use for VRay Fur in the comments down below!
Your Support would make my day!
First step to having a realistic patch of grass is uneven terrain; this mimics an actual garden plot ready to be plated and no garden plot is as even as a regular surface in Sketchup.
The surface you’ll add the Fur or Grass to has to be a single group.
If it’s just plain geometry or a group within a group you’ll notice that the Fur Icon is faded and unclickable.
Select the grouped plain and click the Fur Widget Icon.
Once applied, you’ll see that the widget is just a bunch of dotted lines wrapping around the grouped terrain and nothing else.
Bye Bye Lag.
And if you launch the VRay Asset Editor, you’ll find the widget listed under Geometries, and you can also click on the Geometries tab to access it if you have a ton of assets in your scene.
Clicking on the Arrow button on the Right, expands the window to show you all the widget’s Parameters or Settings.
There’s a lot of them, but don’t let that scare you. We’ll go through them in a bit and you’ll see how easy this is.
The second thing we’re going to need here is to make the grass look like Grass by adding a material to it.
You can do so by scrolling to the Material Rollout and enabling it first.
To add a grass material, I’ll first need to add a Grass material to my Material List.
A Vray Library Grass material should do the trick; no need to get fancy here.
Just remember to turn off any Bump or Displacement settings so you don’t get weird looking stems; we only need the Diffuse map and maybe a bit of Reflection.
To assign the material to the Grass itself, we just have to go back to the Grass’s settings and choose the material we just added from the Drop Down List.
Watch the video to continue following this tutorial and to see how each setting can affect the look of the Grass 🙂
Free Texture Image Resources
Software Used
- Sketchup 2018.
- VRay Next (4.00.02).
- Photoshop Cs6 Extended.
- Giga Pixel AI 4.9.4
- HDRI: HDRI Haven (https://hdrihaven.com).
- Music: Lakey Inspired.
- Video Production: Camtasia 2018.
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