Grass Rendering taking ages

[George Hux]

Very new to rendering landscapes and attempting to teach myself

I am finding rendering grass difficult, I have attempted to design my own 3D pass styles however my computer takes 2-3 hours to complete the render, and it does not even render unless there is only a small area of grass used. anything above 10m2 does not work. Any tips on how to fix this/speed up the rendering time?

[Kevin K]

@George Hux, sadly that is the case. The grass shader does work, but best on very small areas, and yes, it takes forever to render, depending on your choice of rendering options and resolution. Not sure how large an area you are dealing with, but you may want to find a decent looking seamless grass texture and live with that.  

I know that is not what you wanted to hear 😞

 

I have a few textures that I use on my site models that look ok....especially from a distance.

 

Like this: 

 

 

For my renderings when showing a lot of grass, I export my VW file to Cinema 4d, which can apply huge areas of different grasses, etc in seconds and will render very fast.  But....you would need another software app like c4d to achieve that.

Happy to share that texture if you feel it would be acceptable for what you are doing.

Let me know.

 

[Kevin Allen]

the grass shader adds a huge amount of geometry. An image based texture with displacement mapping will be much more efficient. 

[George Hux]

On 12/13/2023 at 4:10 PM, Kevin K said:

@George Hux, sadly that is the case. The grass shader does work, but best on very small areas, and yes, it takes forever to render, depending on your choice of rendering options and resolution. Not sure how large an area you are dealing with, but you may want to find a decent looking seamless grass texture and live with that.  

I know that is not what you wanted to hear 😞

 

I have a few textures that I use on my site models that look ok....especially from a distance.

 

Like this: 

 

 

For my renderings when showing a lot of grass, I export my VW file to Cinema 4d, which can apply huge areas of different grasses, etc in seconds and will render very fast.  But....you would need another software app like c4d to achieve that.

Happy to share that texture if you feel it would be acceptable for what you are doing.

Let me know.

 

 

On 12/13/2023 at 4:10 PM, Kevin K said:

@George Hux, sadly that is the case. The grass shader does work, but best on very small areas, and yes, it takes forever to render, depending on your choice of rendering options and resolution. Not sure how large an area you are dealing with, but you may want to find a decent looking seamless grass texture and live with that.  

I know that is not what you wanted to hear 😞

 

I have a few textures that I use on my site models that look ok....especially from a distance.

 

Like this: 

 

 

For my renderings when showing a lot of grass, I export my VW file to Cinema 4d, which can apply huge areas of different grasses, etc in seconds and will render very fast.  But....you would need another software app like c4d to achieve that.

Happy to share that texture if you feel it would be acceptable for what you are doing.

Let me know.

 

Thanks Kevin,

 

Still getting used to using textures in VW, but I’ll keep this in mind. In the end I used a twinmotion direct link which seemed to do the trick once I populated the area enough. Thanks for the trick👍🏼I’ll take a look

[jmcewen]

I kind of thought I was the only one that ever used grass shaders...

 

I had a project last year that I used the grass shaders to make fur textures on some Halloween-themed cars (cars dressed up as spiders and werewolves, etc.) Those renders took forever but looked great!  Sidenote, grass only grows on the side that faces up when you apply the texture, so I had to chop up the hairy parts, turn them all so the grass would grow in the correct places, then turn each part into a symbol to lock in the "up" orientation, then re-turn and reassemble the parts.  It was a great solution at the time using what I understood at the moment, but there must have been a better way.