Displacement Grass - How does it look?

[Post]

Well the other day when I was in a very little room taking a break I thought that I could make a displacement grass. Which would ease modeling of "real" grass over cuvred areas. Here is my test run:

I hope this helps people, I think it will help to increase modeling speed and ease over using a clipped image. But if you look at the right leg (the one in the back) it is floating above the grass, i hope that some one can help me with the settings to bring the displacement up above the plan. I did it before but was unable to get it working in this model. The starwars model I downloaded for Google warehouse (sorry forgot to record the maker). The ground was a grid that I used FFD to quickly shape the landform.

Tell me what you think.
Thanks in advance for any comments.

-Post-

The grass I used are standard sketchup grasses.:
I'm not sure if the scaling of the model is correct and might need a bit of adjusting.
Overall -
Vegeration_Grass_PuttingGreen
SU settings-H81_S40_L56 Scaling 10mmx10mm
SKindigo settings
Bump Gain .1
Displacement -1
Clip none
Mesh subivion
smoothing off
Max:5
PT -0.1
CT -0.1
Bump adn displacement map:
Vegetation_Grass_artificial-white
SU settings- H320_S3_L69 Scaling 305x305mm
SKindigo settings-none

[Roger]

not bad at all, though the grass can't have any shape but straight up, it looks real nice! not sure if this is the best method to do grass for its real straight, but im sure it renders quite fast and is easy to do. nice done!

[Post]

if I'm not mistaken, if you set your displacement map up correctly (creating the grey scales from black points/shapes) you could b.s. the blades a bit as triangles at different angles to give a bit more varity. I'm going to try this when i get some time, maybe tomorrow morning.

[TKn]

I think the grass looks really nice but for the life of me I cant do it myself, instead I get some bumpy green ground. I'm using SketchUp Pro 6 and SkIndigo 1.1.12 and Indigo 1.1.12.

First of all, I can't set the bump/displacement maps to "Vegetation_Grass_artificial-white" by selecting "SketchUp" in the material editor and clicking the button to the right of the dropdown menu. Clicking "New" there and finding the material in SketchUp's material folder does absolutely nothing. I also haven't been able to find anywhere to put those PT and CT values. The last thing that's missing is the option to deselect Smoothing, though I think I've seen it somewhere (might've been before updating from 1.0.9_3).

I'd really appreciate it if you (or someone else) could help me with this, I tried searching the forums but couldn't find anything

Edit:
Ok, finally managed to get some reasonably ok looking grass by using external images for bump/displacement maps, "Max Subdivisions = 1" and "Minimum Micro-Poly Pixels = 0.4". Pretty much trial and error.

[TKn]

Took a step backward.. Can't get the grass to work on a larger undivided surface. The one above is a grid of 10x10cm squares, the one attached to this post is a single 10x10m square. I suspect "Max Subdivisions" (6 in both) might have something to do with it, but anything above 7 or so crashes indigo. Is there some other solution than manually splitting all my grass surfaces (which SketchUp certainly couldn't handle when they got big) that I'm just not realizing?

[pixie]

The solution is 64 bit

[Thom]

I'm getting some interesting results. Looks promising.