DimensionTheory’s grass shaders look to flat and glossy

RemiliaSutton

I have DimensionTheory's grass shaders for Daz Studio but I can't seem to get it to not look like a flat glossy green solid color when applying it to a terrain In iray. Any help? And other grass shaders you'd suggest instead?

st3ph3nstrang3

Personally I would reccomend using the grass textures provided by Quixel:

https://quixel.com/megascans/home?category=surface&category=grass

Completely free (though you need to create an account). You can choose between 2k, 4k, or 8k resolution. Comes with base maps, ambient occlusion, displacement, normal maps and roughness maps. You will need to assign these textures to the apropriate channel in the surfaces tab in Daz. To make use of all the maps, I'd reccomend applying the PBR shader to the surface. You can then save it as a material preset for future use. I personally use these in Unreal Engine for landscaping and they're great. I also use them in Daz. The only issue (which is not exclusive to these textures, but all terrain texturing in Daz) is that there's no simple way to break up the "tiling" to get less repetition in the texture. You can use clone stamp/heal tool in Gimp to reduce it a bit, but still not quite as powerful as the tools Unreal provides to reduce repetition (this video explains what I'm talking about). Overall though it seems superior to any of the grass shaders I've come across.

EDIT: This will of course not place any actual 3d grass geometry on the terrain. If you need actual blades of grass, you can use Whitemagus Wild Grass Hyper Kit. That in conjuction with the above landscape textures can produce very nice, modular grass wherever you need it. It comes with low poly patches as well in case the SubD ones tank your framerate too hard.

Here's a quick example where you can see the base ground texture produced with Quixel grass textures, and some patches of Whitemagus grass that I placed:

https://i.imgur.com/SS1cV7L.jpg

Richard Haseltine

I assume you mean https://www.daz3d.com/grass-shader-for-daz-studio ? That is a 3Delight product (barring the odd item that was updated you won't see Iray until SKU 22000 or so - and anything that is iray should mention it. It relies on sub-polygon displacement to produce the grass blades, but Iray does not do that - it applies displacement only to actual vertices (from the base mesh or SubD) and a mesh detailed enough to support the shader would be too much for the system to handle.

Taoz

This is not a shader, but a complete (free) grass system, so I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for.  It looks very good but also uses a good deal of resources.  I've attached renders from a test scene I once did, the first one is with the Grass Base plus Full-A layer, on the second the Full-B and Full-C layers have been added to make the grass more dense.

https://erock3d.com/download/erock3d-free-grass-system/