Modeling the single Grass Blade

You could easily start with a ready made mesh and texture like the one that was provided a few days ago here – Free Grass by Mischa Winkler, but my aim was to do it all solo inside SketchUP so you can see how simple it is.

It similar to how Peter Guthrie is doing this inside 3dsmax as featured on his blog – V-Ray Grass Tutorial Part 1 and V-Ray Grass Tutorial Part 2.

To start, we can easily push-pull two shapes into one another. The resulting intersection will be the base for our grass-blade.

This is the resulted shape. The segments here are the result of the initial curve detail drawn up above.

With a quick scale we can make this blade as thin as needed.

Creating the Grass Blade Texture

You can easily find a ready-made blade texture, but the point of this exercise was to do this solo. To start, I create a new blank canvas in Photoshop.

After a quick search in Google Images, I find a good color base to work with for the grass blade texture.

I paste it onto the empty canvas inside Photoshop and blur it out since I only need the general colors.

Adding the dark / light gradient form the bottom of the blade texture.

Doing the same with the middle fold of the blade from inside outwards.

Apply some falloff to this fold so it is less strong up above.

Adding the blade detail with a simple black and white streaks mask.

And there you have it!

Applying the Texture

Next thing is to apply that texture onto the blade model. I’m placing the texture so it fits one face and then I just capture the texture and paint it over the rest so it all flows smooth.

This is how the blade looks like without the fold modeled yet.

Adding an additional line along the center will allow…

A scale operation to be made and get the fold locked in the model itself too.

Scattering and Export to VRMesh

For the scattering I’m using the Make Fur plugin by Tak2hata which can generate grass, or any other object for that matter, using a variety of parameters to distribute them randomly over an area.

See this video for an overview of what can be done with it and follow my process right after.

Here is my small patch of scattered blades using the Make Fur plugin.

Next thing is to convert it into a V-Ray Proxy object. Clicking on the toolbar export button and picking a folder to save into.

Replace the full version with the proxy version, and also control the amount of triangles if you like. This is not critical as we are going to simply this even further.

Replacing V-Ray Proxy with Simple Geometry

I’m taking a very simple approach to using proxy stand-ins inside SketchUP. We don’t even need the small triangle amounts generated by the proxy export process… All we need is the patch boundary – This could be a simple line circle. Considering the amount of proxies we are going to scatter, this will help a lot to reduce the load on the viewport.

I’m picking the triangles and hiding them away, as well as the base circle face – all we need is the circle.

Or any other shape that defines the patch you created. In this case I made two. I also add a small line point upwards to indicates that so we don’t flip them by mistake during a scatter operation.

Quick Test and making the Lawn

I’m doing a quick test render to make sure the proxies are working ok first.

Next, to demonstrate with a lawn, I’m creating the plane on which we will scatter the proxies.

I’m using the Make Fur plugin again, this time with the Crowd scatter feature which allows loading of several SketchUP components for the process.

This is how it all looks after the scatter :

Zoomed in…

And test rendered too…

This is how it looks in the end!

Not too complex and all done from within SketchUP!

In the following how-to you’ll see how I made a more complex scene based on the same method showcased here.