opinions on grass for iray?
Mister Daddy Longlegs
Posts: 59
I'm looking for some grass for iray, I have a couple products in my wishlist:
wild grass hyper kit https://www.daz3d.com/wild-grass-hyper-kit and ultimate grass and meadow worldbuilder https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-grass--meadow-worldbuilder
They both look good to me, my main concerns: I only have a 6GB GPU (RTX 2060). If one or both of them is high in memory consumption than its probably a no-go for both. I'd need to at least have a couple g8 figures in the scene.
Also, I like that grass and meadow has animation capabilities, but its also 3 times more expensive than grass hyper kit, when you add in the separate aniblocks. So I'm not sure if its worth it to me. I'm also guessing that its probably much higher memory consumption than wild grass hyper kit, but I could be wrong.
Wild grass hyper kit is probably good enough for my needs, but looking for opinions. Does anyone have both and able to give an opinion on using them? What are render times like? If render times are really long, I probably won't even consider using the animation aspect, so then it becomes a choice of which one goes on sale first.
also, if there's something better you recommend than either of these 2 products, to make a big grass field, let me know!
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Comments
try this:
https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascenery--realistic-landscape-system
I've not used the Hyper Kit, but I have used the Worldbuilder product. The minimum recommended GPU has only 4 Gb of memory. The Worldbuilder product uses instances heavily, so you'll want to optimize for memory under Instancing Optimization in Iray render settings. As per the product page, you'll also want to hide instances until you're ready to render.
The tricky part is how much more you want in your scene in addition to the grass. I wouldn't suggest more than 2 clothed and haired figures.
An alternative is to use an HDRI with a field of grass and a product like Foreground Blends for close-up detail. You can even make your own HDRI of a field made with Worldbuilder, if you can't find a suitable one elsewhere, either here at Daz or at HDRI Haven or some other site. You might still want the Foreground Blends thing if your scene involves close-up grass.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/410781/making-an-hdri-with-gimp#latest
Current vendors on sale are ones with names beginning with the letters K,L and M. ThePhilosopher's stuff will probably been on sale in a day or three, and that will be a decent saving. #neverpayfullprice
That's also an option, and much more flexible, but it's more resource heavy than the Worldbuilder product.
I have the Ultimate Grass & Meadow Worldbuilder product, and it looks amazing. However, if you have an older computer it will struggle with it quite a bit (at least that's been my experience with it on my older computer).
I don't have the WIld Grass Hyper Kit, so I don't have any experience with that.
cool, i missed that somehow. It may be over my head though for my experience. I'm wishlisting it though.
the foreground blend thing and HDR is a good idea. I have a bunch of HDRs already from hdrihaven so thats an easy option right there. I also just looked at the tutorial of the ultimate grass and meadow world builder. It looks really good, i can see now why its more expensive. I'm hoping it does get deeply discounted soon as I'm leaning more towards that now.
if you are doing something with animated grass, unless you have a beefy computer, DAZ studio and iray would not be my first choice.
Maybe Octane free tier but that has issues with collapsed instances too and clashes with UltraScenery apparently too.
you might get away with 3Delight for the stand based dforce grass as not as texture map reliant as furs and hairs.
I don't own them so don't know how resource heavy they are.
Static grass you have far more options, even morphing transmapped grass instanced a possibility if not trying to do collision just wind movements.
you might want to look into other softwares if wanting stuff like this
my computer is pretty new, but its kind of a budget build, only16GB ram, AMD 3700 Ryzen processor, and RTX 2060 GPU. Not sure how that compares to what you're using. I wish I could have gotten a 2080 GPU, but what I have is generally fast enough for my needs as long as I don't put too much in the scene. I tend to do simple stuff with just 2-3 figures max. its only bumped to CPU a couple times, and then what I've had to do is render in multiple layers. One thing recently I wanted to use but couldn't was Collective3Ds Neighborhood Block 1. I didn't try it out before the 30 days, and I can't use it unless it bumps to CPU, which kind of defeated the purpose of why I bought it. But luckily thats the only thing I've had a problem with so far.
LOL runs rings around mine so ignore everything I said
Ultrascenery is extremely easy to get good results with. I have both and would probably purchase it over the Worldbuilder, if I had to make a choice. You won't always just want grass. It takes a lot longer to generate a scene, i.e., 10-20 minutes vs nearly instantaneously for the Worldbuilder, but you also get many more options, with or without expansion modules.
Worldbuilder renders a lot faster, though. I did a quick render of a plain field using each. Ultrascenery gives you more (near infinite) terrain options, whereas you have 6 base terrains with Worldbuilder. And Ultrascenery has water and road options included in the base package.
Here are a couple of quick renders of what plain grass looks like with no other options selected with each.
Interesting. Does Ultrascenery provide a way to add grass to existing terrain sets? Say for example a set like https://www.daz3d.com/mountain-valley. I really like this set but would like an easy way to replace the grass without it poking through the sideway and roadway. I'm not sure how easy it would be to create a map that allgns with the layout of that set.
No. Ultrascenery works with the terrains it generates. It does not generate props. For other purposes, you'd want to add grass props available with other products like the Hyper Kit or https://www.daz3d.com/the-imperfect-lawn--essential-grassland-flowers-and-plants. Besides, that would be overkill for something like this.
I have looked at the Whitemagus realistic grass evolution which... wait for it... apparently has real geometry... which of course comes at a premium for rendering and so the product is sorted into low, medium and high resolution if I may put it that way.
But you're not going to get G8 in there in one go, so you'd probably have to combine 2 or more separate renders.
Hopefully a few of these go on sale around the same time so I can buy and compare and keep what works best for me, and if they discount enough (1.99 one day PC+, hope hope) maybe I'll buy them all!
This is a freebie: https://erock3d.com/download/erock3d-free-grass-system/
Diomede has made some grasses too
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/413106/tree-for-daz-studio-added-and-grass#latest
Was going to mention that too, here's a couple of test renders I once did using the base plus Full A, B and C clusters. Scene used a bit over 5 GB VRAM, I tried to remove the grass but it was still over 4 GB so it doesn't seem to use a lot of resources but it's also a rather small piece of lawn of course.
There's also https://www.daz3d.com/g3d-da-grass-and-plant-pack, which might be good for just adding a few grassy areas to a scene. It's on sale right now, and was discussed in this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/post/quote/230621/Discussion_230621
UltraScatter Pro is distinct from UltraScenery. UltraScatter is very flexible. It will let you spread grass props you already have across the surface of a terrain you already have. So, you can spread an old Lisa's Botanicals flower across the old Curious Chapel terrain, or you can spread my freebie grass across a primitive plane you create in your scene. Lots of levers to control where items are placed, and how densely.
Ultrascatter Pro upgrade - https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascatterpro--upgrade-from-ultrascatter-advanced-instancing
Commercial Thread for UltraScatter - https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/101156/ultrascatter-v1-5-0-released-commercial/p1
The Erock3d one is good for smallish areas. IIRC it has several different levels of patchiness and weediness.
As for animated grasses, I have never seen anything quite like Flowscape for the grasses, but that would mean taking obj files of all the DS bits and using Flowscape for the scene as frustratingly Flowscape has no export. The program is based on the Unity Game engine and animates most of the assets it comes with in short loop animations. The rendering is not as good as iRay, but playing with obj material settings can lead to better results on the imported bits than you get by using the DS default export settings Look at the videos & images for it here: https://pixelforest.itch.io/flowscape
There's a product called Foreground Blends (obviously a great name for a Grass product *rolls eyes*); it can do great grass, but takes some work; is also strand dforce if required.
https://www.daz3d.com/foreground-blends
And you can apply it to dForceable planes to conform to uneven surfaces, as discussed here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/413306/foreground-blends-question#latest
....I was wondering about Ultrascenery, thanks. I need grass that can be used with existing sets. Tired of grass that looks like flattened like under a sheet of glass or clear plastic.
Wish there was a displacement based grass shader for Iray like AOA's grass shaders for 3DL.
and there is Unreal Engine 4
even my crappy PC can run it
Several products that do just that were mentioned in this thread.
well i finally bought the https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascenery--realistic-landscape-system yesterday with the nice "5-or-less" sale it was pretty cheap. Thanks to all for all the great suggestions. I'm still probably going to pick up the foreground blends, I like that its dforce compatible and that should give me a way to add a little animation in the foreground for realism with a wind node hopefully.
I'm new to landscaping myself. Suppose I just want to add volume to an existing grass material that's "fitted" to its environment, which would be recommended here?
Ultrascatter can use masks
in Carrara with replicators I can choose the surface I wish to replicate on too
in DAZ studio you could possibly with the geometry editor edit a second copy of a terrain to just have the surface you want to instance on,
also this could be used with geometry shells and noise shaders offset in cutout opacity
I can isolate that material, the lawn, in Blender, make a single mesh out of it, would take me like a minute. But exactly which product should I consider purchasing for stuff like this? I don't wanna get it wrong.
it's really up to what you want to do
for grass the inbuilt strand hair even can work it just cannot be dforced
if you are using Blender you can even create particle hair and convert it to mesh if not too big a patch
Ultrascatter helps with instancing stuff on surfaces and is actually the only thing I would recommend purchasing
you can use any actual geometry in it and there are plenty of free grass and plant models around as well as DAZ ones
the geometry shell option is more a texture map thing and depends entirely on how the object is UV mapped
these are 3Delight shaders I like that could be adapted for the geometry shell option
https://www.sharecg.com/v/36638/Texture/Fuzzy-Wuzzy-Fur-Shader-Daz%7CStudio
I suppose the lowest-resource option would be the most ideal, I've got a decent machine but I try to minimize geometry wherever I can.