How to populate dense extremely large field of grass??
polycounter lvl 9
Hello, I am using Maya 2018 and Redshift to create a scene for work. I have seen both MASH and Xgen recommended for populating terrains with grass. I have tried mash, it really slowed down my machine after populating just a small portion of my scene. Should I go for Xgen or try to push through with MASH? For context, the scene I am trying to populate is the entire top side of a mountain where the camera path is pulled out from the middle and past the edge of mountain. It will be rendered at 8K in a fisheye format, so it's difficult to get away with some short cuts like using a image planes and so on. :c I would very much appreciate any thoughts and brainstorming!!
Replies
Is it needed to render with Redshift? Bifrost could do it but you would need to render with Arnold. At least until the USD update ships for Bifrost.
Redshift is not strictly necessary, it's just what we have available/purchased at the studio. I would be fine using Arnold if we can use it on our render farm, I haven't really looked into setting up a farm with Arnold. I'll look into seeing if it's affordable to get some render licenses for. If that's not a possibility, do you have any other recommendations? Thank you for your thoughts!!
Just in case you haven’t the time to learn Bifrost. This tool here is based on Bifrost. It’s "just" a UI on top. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/J9q8b0
You could also try to export Alembic files from Bifrost and use Redshift Proxies to load the Data.
Yeh unfortunately it looks like I wont be able to use Arnold as we don't have licenses for our farm. This tool looks like great fun in any case! I haven't used bifrost since 2014 or something, but I'll check out trying to export Alembics, I'm already very familiar with the proxy system. Thank you so much for the ideas!!