Fantasy Environment - Grass

Grass Tufts

So far, I’ve found grass tufts to be fairly simple. I had created a grass tuft generator earlier so using that I was able to create a flexible and customizable system that can produce a variety of grass tuft shapes and densities.

The Grass Blade graph (previously “grass_tufts”) has two blade outputs and two transform viewer outputs (both of which I’d make a switch if I knew how to). This creates a simple blade of grass with a spine in the center of it. One outputs a grass blade affected by a Gaussian Noise, and another with a Perlin Noise.

The graphs could do a with a switch between noise types, but I’m pressed for time.

I create a spline and blade in the same way, just one is wider than the other. Perhaps adding the gradient before the blend would have given me a more useful look, but for now; it’ll do.

These tufts use the previously mentioned Grass Tufts Generator.

Before we start, Grass blades go into Splatter Circular Grayscale. The key is to make the spread high and the radius nearly 0. Randomizing the rotation, scale and colour can help too.

(seen to the right)

1) Then they’re placed into a Tile generator/Sampler. As long as the position is on point the scale, rotation and symmetry (on the x-axis) can be random.

2) I warp the tiled items to make them a little different

3) Repeat step 1,

4) and step 2 with different tufts

5) I create a another tile generator using the same x&y amounts but instead of image inputs, I use Squares. Then and use it as a mask to combine the two groups together.

6) I use the levels and blur to create an opacity map and diffuse map

7) I apply a noise map to greyscale using “multiply”

8) And then use that to create a roughness map

9) and a normal map.

Grass Texture

And using the above techniques, I can easily make a tileable grass texture