D-Former Question

H. J. Valdi

Hi

I'm trying to set up a scene that uses realistic looking grass, but I'm going to need a lot of it, and I'd like it to be shaped with ridges, bumps and hills. I'm using Predatron's grass as it's probably the most real I've found, but even the largest square of the stuff isn't large enough. So I'm wondering if it's possible to make several squares into one large piece that I can then apply a D-Former to, so it can be done all in one go, instead of having to apply D-Formers to multiple pieces.

I'm still a total noob when it comes to D-Formers so I don't know what's possible with them.

Richard Haseltine

One option, if your system will handle it, would be to load the grass props and arrange them over the aea you want, then export as OBJ, finally import that OBJ and apply the DS materials and your DFormers to it. Another option is to create your DFormers, select all the grass props and in the DForm pane (Window>Panes>DForm) click Add Node(s) and then in the dialogue select all the DFormers - that will make them affect each of the grass props in their field of effect.

cwichura

Is Predatron's grass shader based? Or actual geometry? If it's shader based, can you apply it to a plane primitive sized as you need it and then D-Form that?

H. J. Valdi

Thanks for the suggestions, Richard. I don't think my rig is up to working with quite so many squares of grass, and it doesn't help that I totally suck at using D-Formers. I did manage to try both of the methods you put forth, but then everything slowed to a crawl.

@cwichura - Predatron's grass comes with a separate ground surface for the grass to go on top off, but I tried applying a D-Former to that and the grass didn't move with the ground. Bah!

No matter. I think I need to play around with D-Formers a lot more first.

Thanks guys :-)