Out for a little stroll
This little project I put together was a further test of Redshifts capability to instance tens of thousands of points. The grass and flower assets I used were found online as I admittedly need to practice making my own. But as this wasn’t the main focus of the project I thought I would leave that for another day. (Update, I now know how to make trees!)
To create the shot I made a simple grid with a mountain displacement to get the uneven ground effect. I then textured this with a muddy dirt material. You don’t really see a lot of it, but where there are thinner patches in the grass, or where it transitions from grass to water it does help to sell the effect.
I added a second grid overlaid on the main ground which was used as the “puddle” layer, a blue sky HDRI and a reflective texture was all that I needed to make it look convincing.
For the instancing, I scattered thousands of points over the primary ground grid but omitted the lowest points so that I could avoid having foliage in the puddle areas. As you can see I assigned most of the points to the grass models which were randomly rotated around the Y axis for variation. There is a slight variation in scale but I wanted to keep it mostly uniform.
The text layer was created by projecting a font onto the terrain grid. By creating a masked area on the main terrain itself the flowers would conform to the shape of the ground. I then experimented with different densities of several flower models to see what would look the best. It was actually quite tricky to dial this in because I had to find a good combination of font and flower distribution in order to get the effect I wanted, whilst keeping the text readable.
I used a procedurally generated noise over the font flower points to drive the scale attribute to give the effect that they were growing over time.
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!