During the course of this tutorial you will learn the various options of 3DS Max’s Hair and Fur Modifier (WSM). The grass you’ll create will look great from a distance and more than decent in those highly coveted grassy close-ups. The downsides of the Hair and Fur modifier is that it usually increases render time and that the results are not always predictable.

We’re using 3DS Max 2011 but the process is basically the same on most previous versions. That being said, the 2011 version has loads of improvements and you should really check it out.

 

 

1/4 The Scene

Fire-up 3DS Max, maximize the perspective window (alt+W), hit the File/ Restore button to clear any personal settings and create a plane of roughly 140 by 140 units and with 25 height segments and the same amount of length segments.

Click the Modify tab {} and assign a wave modifier to the plane.

Set Amplitude 1 to 6 and the Wave Length to 100. This will help us achieve a nice, 3D, grass shadow effect.

Open up 3DS Max’s Material Editor {} by pressing the “M” key, select the first empty slot, change the Diffuse color to a brown and assign it to the plane.

Right Click the plane and Convert it to an Editable Poly so it will be easier to work with. {This step can be skipped }

2/4 Render Setup

This is really straight forward. Just open the Render Setup {} window by pressing the “F10“ key, scroll down to the Assign Renderer, click the Production button and assign the mental ray renderer from the list.

3/4 3DS Max’s Hair and Fur modifier

With the plane still selected click the Modify tab {} (if you’re not there already) and add a Hair and Fur (WSM) modifier.

Scroll down to the tools section and unroll it. Click the Load button from the Presets tab and select the tall grass preset.

All we have to do now is adjust it to fit our 3D scene. Scroll down to the General Parameters tab and set the count to 10000 or so, the hair segments to 6, Scale (overall size of the grass) to 60, the Root Thick (grass root thickness) to 12 and the Tip Thick (grass tip thickness) to 0.08

Scroll down to the Material Parameters tab and set the Specular value to 90 and the Glossiness to 30. This will make our grass texture have compact reflections.

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