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Re:Texture Study: Dormant Grass by themodelplumber on Monday December 15, 2014 @06:25PM (#8755083)
Pretty cool that he's writing his own code to do this (presumably). It reminded me of a neat tutorial for creating grass in Blender:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eshOzshjt90

I created 100% procedural grass using Blender for a book cover recently, and while it didn't have nearly the attention to detail you see in places like Pixar films, the effect was just right for the author's work. I would add that (at least semi-real) shadows are really important for improving the quality of any grass texture.

Re:Texture Study: Dormant Grass by tylerhobbs on Monday December 15, 2014 @07:11PM (#8755263)
Thank you! (I'm the author of the post.) I am indeed writing my own code; I'm just using simple functions from Processing.

Thank you very much for the video link. It occurred to me while working on this that video game artists and animators probably do a ton of this, and have much more sophisticated models. Indeed, the result from that video is really, really good. I'm coming from a painting and abstract background. This was my first real exercise in studying natural patterns and textures through algorithmic artwork. I mostly intend to apply it to abstract artwork, but the more realistic approach shown in the video is a different, interesting angle on the same subject.