Making Awesome Grass in Blender EEVEE


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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Create a ‘field’ plane for the grass. This will be the particle system source.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Render!
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