So, it’s just past the second anniversary of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and that was a game that I would have really liked to play. The promotional art is breathtaking:
I’ve tried to make grass that looks similar to this in Blender, and so after a lot of experimentation, I made a tutorial showing how to do this in Blender 2.8, rendering it in the new (awesome) EEVEE engome. Find it here:
This isn’t actually super hard to do. I’m going to leave a quick summary below of the process:
- Create and shape your grass object. This is just a plane that’s tapered on one end, or you can think of it as a stretched out trapezoid. It’s the basic grass blade shape, which is used in the particle system. You could also make multiple, slightly varied grass particles, create a group with them, and use that as your particle system object, but that isn’t really necessary.
- Texture your grass particle. Just a simple gradient looks fine, but you might need to rotate it depending on how you set up the particle. Use the mapping node in the compositor for this.
- Create a ‘field’ plane for the grass. This will be the particle system source.
- Shade the field some field colour - an easy way to do this is to give it the same material as your grass, so they look the same, colour-wise.
- Add a particle system and adjust some settings: Turn on the
settings, randomize the size/rotation, add interpolated children (just 10 is enough), turn gravity down to about zero, add some stiffness, and adjust the clumping. You can see all these things in the video. - Make a wind/harmonic force field, and move it around the scene to make it look like wind is blowing across the grass, and make it sway. Be sure to adjust the strength a lot, because it might look unnatural depending on how quickly/sharply the grass moves.
- Light the scene with a few yellow/sun coloured area lamps, and maybe also a sun lamp. A distant blue point lamp, imitating the colour of the sky, might be helpful too. I used this method for the lighting for the video.
- Render!