Creating a Grass Field in 3DS Max

By Stealth Snake| 3D Studio Max | Intermediate

This tutorial will teach you how to create a grass field in 3D Studio Max using the 'Scatter' Compound Modifier. This modifier could be used to scatter copies of any object on a surface of another object. The technique learnt in this tutorial could be used to generate similar scenes of any scattered content that needs to be spread over a certain area. Below is an example image of what we will be creating by the end of this tutorial.

3DS Max, Grassfield, Scatter Modifier

The main sections of our tutorial are as follows:

Create a simple plain terrain to scatter our grass on its surface.
Add a grass plant to the scene.
Use the scatter modifier to scatter the grass plant over the terrain plain.

create terrain

Start off by creating the plane on which our grass will be scattered. We will give this a terrain look by converting the plane to polygons and then moving its vertices around. There is no specific result that you have to get, but you can look at mine to get an idea of what it should look like.

Create a Plane Simple Terrain Layout

Adding the Grass Plant

Our next step is to first add a single grass plant which we will then duplicate and scatter all over the plain terrain we created in the previous step. The type of grass plant we will add is called 'Society Garlic". To add the grass plant, access the Create tab, and then select the AEC Extended item collection from the dropdown list. Select Foliage from the Object Type rollout and then select Society Garlic from the Favorite Plants rollout.

3d studio max Foliages dialog

Click once on the stage to add the Society Garlic plant on the plain terrain. You can reduce the size of the grass plant by adjusting the value of the Height from the Parameters rollout under the Modify tab.

Society Garlic plan big Society Garlic Parameter Rollout Society Garlic plan small

Using the Scatter Compound to Scatter the Grass Plant Over the Terrain

To use the Scatter modifier we have to select the Grass Plant on the scene and then go through Create>Compound>Scatter.

Scatter Modfier

Access the Pick Distribution Object rollout under the create tab, click on the Pick Distribution Object and then select the terrain plain to set it as the distribution object. This should make the Grass Plant move to one of the corners of the terrain plain and no duplicates can be seen on the terrain plain other than that one instance. To create duplicates of your Grass Plant, scroll down scatter object rollout to find the Duplicates parameter under the Source Object Parameters and set its value to 20.

Pick Distribution Object rollout one instance of model with scatter modifier
source object Parameter, Duplicates 20 instance of model with scatter modifier

You can increase the number of duplicates by altering the value of duplicates as illustrated in the step above. However, if you are going to use a high number of duplicates, you might want to set the Display Option to Proxy to display the duplicates as simple wedges in order to speed up the display of images on the viewport. This option will not affect your rendered images.

source duplicates as simple wedges

I experimented with a number of different plants which I scattered over the terrain plain. I also added a tree, placed a camera, and one omni light to create the natural scene you see rendered below.

final rendercreate with 3d studio max

This concludes our tutorial, but there are loads of other parameters that can explore such as the Distribution Object Parameters and the Transforms rollout - you should play with them to see all the possibilities you can achieve. Please feel free to post at the Forum if you have any questions.

- End of Tutorial