SpeedTree - Quick Grass

[@atlanteum]

At 11:00, if I understand the question correctly, I think you're looking for "blade" of grass, sir. It attaches to the "sheath," which it the structural part that actually grows out of the ground - but unless you're telling a story from the point of view of an ant, that's probably more information than called for in 3D! Excellent tutorial - thank you very much.

[@DamSchool]

Thanks so much!

[@swaroop_ayila]

thank you so much. you explained it very easy to understand for a beginner

[@DamSchool]

Thanks for your comment! Very appreciated

[@emilcgi4148]

Damn... It talks! :D Nice to finally see that you record tutorial with voiceover and perfect timing as i have been diving into speedtree lately ;)

[@DamSchool]

Hahaha, needed time to get ride of some of the french accent there :)

[@instatriss]

Amazing lesson

[@DamSchool]

Glad you like it !

[@F10F11hm]

Welcome back! Please remember about the Thunderstorm tutorial, it was fantastic and it'd be great if you could continue it, with the postproduction phase etc. :)

[@DamSchool]

Thanks! I will add it to my list :)

[@F10F11hm]

@@DamSchool Thank you!

[@86Dina]

Thanks for the lesson. Is it possible to change texture for some parts of steams? Or it's always one material for all the copies of trunks+fronds?

[@DamSchool]

It is one material per fronds, but for that I would just reduce the amount, duplicate the node, and apply a different shader on the new one.

[@박지호-h6i4o]

Thank you for Tutorial! 강의 잘 들었습니다! :)

[@DamSchool]

You're welcome!

[@Dhieen]

Thetips at the end of the video are really cool But if i import that into unreal engine 5, will i have wind setup ? how does it works? can i do some color variation? how about optimization? Will i be able to paint a huge terrain with this grass?

[@Kale_116]

If you correctly import it into UE5.5 with Atlases enabled the import should spit out 4 or so material instances (for larger assets.. instead of 13 different material lol) All of which are hooked up to a master that supports the speedtree node. (Only the wind though you have to set up your texture adjustments diy. I believe you can simplify the polys after rendering the animation, it's just that high at this stage to get good animation results. Nanite doesn't support advanced wind shaders, or at least not yet.. but you can set up LOD materials that drop the animation at distance.. Yea 48k tris for a grass asset will eat you system if you're trying to play realtime.

[@MeeschaMouseArt]

When you say to export the grass textures in Quixel and to "crop" them, would you mind elaborating on that? I got this far but am having some major issues with all of the blades of grass showing on on the fronds, so I'm assuming it has something to do with the cropping aspect but I'm not sure what you mean by that. This tutorial regardless is extremely helpful, thank you for posting it.

[@DamSchool]

It doesn't need to be quixel but the goal here is to have a simple sets of texture when albedo, match the opacity, etc, from the size and aspect ratio. Basically it will help speedtree having your albedo with proper opacity, proper roughness and normal maps. Speedtree comes with some preset textures you can try to see if it's a cropping issue. I believe they are in the samples folder in your speed tree installation. The advantage of picking speedtree is that when you'll pick your first albedo he is gonna detect other texture and ask you to creat the shader for you, clic yes and check the result. Keep me posted

[@ArthurMorganus]

How would you go about lowering the polycount though? If I inted to export it for a game engine, can I do something about that?

[@DamSchool]

The polycount is quite low, the importance in your case you be either to use it in Nanite meshes, OR to do multiples LOD based on distance view. Like a planar type of grass for farback view with opacity maps

[@VMP666]

Ok, so I'm pretty much at the end and I encountered a big problem - the wind looks nothing like the one you show here. I'm working on 9.4 but I suspect it's not that different from the version you're using, and can't for the life of me get the wind effect you have here, with those beautiful individually animated strands. Mine either go absolutely insane or bend uniformly, like one mesh. Any ideas what am I doing wrong?

[@DamSchool]

It could be from a multiple things but First, did you set the wind properly like in the video? Make sure you are set in grass and not tree in the wind property 2) Making sure you use multiple trunks as grass blades so they should move individually. 3) When you apply a force with a randomize, does it affect all the blades or only some? it could be a test to see how things react.

[@VMP666]

@@DamSchool I kinda got it going, but not nearly as good looking as you have it. It looks very bendy and displace'y, not at all as realistic as in your case. All the steps you mentioned are there, did you do anything specific to the wind in the settings? Like with the splines etc? Because I don't seem to get the same effect just from selecting Grass in the wind wizard. There are differences in the 9.4 interface, though, some options vary in places, some have more settings etc. This is my first day with Speedtree though (I'm very experienced in Blender and other graphic software) so I suspect I'll make it work eventually.

[@DamSchool]

@@VMP666 I will have to take a look at the newest SpeedTree, Did you try opening one of their tree or foliage template and see how it react? The only thing I did was playing with the Turbulence and Bending curve in the wind. And in the blade of the foliage Force using a randomizer with the +/- buttons so it create slight variations. If you're struggling we can exchange email at some point and we can check together.

[@VMP666]

@@DamSchool that would be neat! I'll try and work it out, if I hit a wall I'll get back to you. Their templates and examples work fine. Now if Soeedtree wind in .st9 worked with Unreal 5.2 Foliage....

[@DamSchool]

@@VMP666 It should, I used it not too long ago and it worked, keep me posted and good luck!

[@wuchenghaiSAMA]

There's just little points on my spline,which makes the grass looks really fake, and I found no where to adjust the number of the point . Is it because I'm using the meter unit?

[@wuchenghaiSAMA]

oh I GOT IT. I can change the length-absolute in Segments

[@DamSchool]

@@wuchenghaiSAMA Yes, sorry I saw your message late. It is in the Segments of the length. Don't need to add too much. Enjoy!

[@かなや-l5m]

分かりやすかったです

[@Dhieen]

what kind of grass is it? can i paint it on a large landscape with a forest nearby? something like that? id love more info about this

[@DamSchool]

Not sure I understand your question? You can do whatever you want but keep it mind that this grass was meant to be used in Vray so it s a little bit more heavy. You can use it in Unreal but make sure it s converted to Nanite first!

[@Dhieen]

@@DamSchool Ok yeah, i did some smaller grass because this one was too big Id love to make grass with rocks like in your thumbnail, id love to see how does your unreal engine scene looks with this grass, about the shader you created, and the technical settings, because if you paint alot of grass on a big landscape it starts to lag very fast So to fix that i set my grass without any opacity, only mesh, and enabled nanite, i have good fps with this, and what is costing alot is wind animation, so i disabled it at a certain distance I would have lvoed to know this before

[@GeorgeNicola]

And how convenient is it to get this to 3ds max and still keep the animation?

[@DamSchool]

Export with Usd or Alembic, it's pretty easy and convenient . Depending on the scatter soft you will use, you can then just offset the timeline of each

[@St4rDrift]

I'm having a weird problem where my fronds aren't following the bones of the trunk. SpeedTree also says that the height of my trunk is 1.3m as it is accounting for the polygons even after I disabled them. How can I fix this?

[@DamSchool]

Did you make sure in your node that the fronds are after the trunk and liked to them ? Are your bones disabled or hided ? The size doesn't really matter as you can always scale down later on in your 3d app. But normally to get a proper size you have to be cautious and set your Spine length correctly. Around 0.10 to 0.20 is a proper height.

[@St4rDrift]

@@DamSchool I was able to get it to work but not fix the problem. The fronds are linked to the trunk. The bones are the only part of the trunk enabled. I found the problem to be when I changed the starting rotation of the trunks, the side parts would angle up adding total height. Thanks for the help, it worked really well!

[@sonic55193]

I learned a lot but that's one expensive grass.

[@cg_rush]

Cool, tnx you)))

[@DamSchool]

You're welcome!

[@ranveersinghbaid3841]

give the source of grass please

[@Dhieen]

this tutorial is okayish mdr

[@VMP666]

"Strands" or "blades" ;)

[@DamSchool]

Hahaha thanks! My gardening skills just upgraded :D

[@jacklawrence2221]

too heavy for game performance

[@DamSchool]

You can replace those frond with bigger ones, and a more dense and fluffly opacity map.