Once purchased, you can download the deepgrass library, containing the surface shaders and the textures to start with.
You can append them into your scene via file/append.
The shaders are already set up with textures for:
- lawn
- meadow
- flowers
- grass fields
- wheat fields
- forest ground (fern and twigs)
And transparent weed shaders to use on ayered surfaces atop each other. They can be used to fake objects intersecting the volume of the grass.
- grass_transparent 1
- grass_transparent 2
- deepgrass transparent bushes
Deepgrass nodegroups: Using your own textures of grassrows is easy and they are swiftly changed in the shader via the "change textures here" nodegroup. This pack is meant ot be quickly customized by you.
Each shader has basic parameters to adjust the textures in height and width so that they have the right scale and dont look stretched.
Also you can set the density of rows. this is useful especially when using transparent layers on top. These can have slightly different densities than the groundlayer, to add even more variance (as the layers wont have the same stackingpattern then).
A bump value sets the strength of bump.
Deepgrass transparent node groups transparent shaders have a fresnel fade parameter, which controls how quickly they fade to transparent.
The more transparent layers you use the better the intersections with other geometry like buildings and Trees will look. Usually 2-3 layers do a good job.
Transparent materials should be set to alpha hashed transparency and shadow mode. This will lead to the best shadow casting through the layers. The shaders are already setup this way, just be sure there is a reason for that.
RENDER TIMES:
Are superfast, since all the shader does is blending 4 rows of overlapping grass-fences in one angle.
4 different angles are intersecting each other to make a smooth transition when the camera moves. all 16 visible rows are stacked on top of a parallaxed ground texture, thats offset to the roots of the grass rows.
The shader might take some time (10 seconds) to compile in the first frame rendered. But once compiled it will render very fast, especially in eevee.
USE CUSTOM TEXTURES:
One of the major features of this Product is that you can use your own textures to quickly change your scene. 2D image textures are modfied much faster than geometry of 3D meshes of grass models used in other packs.
Just be sure about one thing: instead of using 0% alpha for pixels that shall be transparent, use 1% alpha value and give these pixels a color, thats similiar to their grasscolor.
The nodesetup strongly alters the alphachannel as it needs it for several blending techniques. Grey or white edges may appear, if the transparent pixels are 0% alpha, as the image might lose colordata in that pixels when the image is saved. It will preserve the colordata of a pixel, if it has alpha 1.3%.