Texture Study: Dormant Grass

http://www.tylerlhobbs.com/writings/texture-study-grass

by tjake • 12 years ago

23 4 12 years ago

Does the author release the code behind his generated images?

tylerhobbs2• 12 years ago

Hi, I'm the author of the post. I don't normally release my code, but in this case I did post a gist of the main function to Twitter: https://gist.github.com/thobbs/e879b7dad8f3733d58d1

I'm using Quil, which is a Clojure wrapper for Processing. The source is quite dense, so it's hard to understand without following the post. It's mostly about tweaking probability distributions along gradients.

themodelplumber• 12 years ago

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.

tylerhobbs2• 12 years ago

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.

Texture Study: Dormant Grass

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