James Shaw – Blog

Here is a tutorial on how to make grass within Max, based of Peter Guthrie’s excellent example (www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/03/vray-grass-tutorial-part-1/), but taking it a little further and applying this idea in bulk with Max’s built in tools.

The basic work flow is to model a very simple grass blade, make a cluster of grass and scatter across any object. Here is a example we (www.squintopera.com)used this technique in to give you an idea of the finished effect; www.jamesshaw.co.nz/#/content/Film/Cairo.flv/

Here is a couple of base CG beauty passes to give you an idea of the raw result before any post work has been done on it;

MAKING GRASS STRANDS

As previously mentioned this is based off Peter Guthrie’s tutorial with a few variations or notes to expand on this idea.

Firstly make a plane with 1 segment across and several in the length direction. Then add a length-ways UVW mapping, taper and using an edit mesh above this with soft select on vertex warp to a shape you like or several variations you can make into a group.

MATERIALS

Collapse the stack into an edit mesh. Then rotate the 4 strands into different directions by selecting and rotating the different elements. Then randomly set 4 id’s for them. This is so you can subtly change the colour with a colour correction within you multi-sub material.

Then make a multi-sub object material with 4 vray materials.

And within each multi sub make a VRay2SidedMtl like the following. You can also use the following grass textures by clicking on them and right click and save image. There’s a black and white one that you can use as an option for the translucency channel. But you can just leave this blank if the grass is at a distance and leave it grey.

The VRay2SidedMtl really is one of the most important things to use to get the light illuminating through the blades. Otherwise your grass will tend to look very flat.

Inside this VRay2SidedMtl sits a pretty simple vray material with the above grass blade in the diffuse channel (thank you Peter Guthrie for originally making this), with reflect set to white and Fresnel checked so it doesn’t look like chrome. Then adjust the Hilight glossiness to 0.6 which will help to spread the specular light you get off the grass. Again this is another very important part to make the grass look convincing. And unlike Refl. glossiness it will not be costly in render time and look almost identical, especially at typical grass distance.

To get variation in the grass tone change the bitmap diffuse channel to “Colour Correction” with the grass blade jpeg as the map, then shift the hue and saturation as follows differently for each of the 4 material id’s.

MAKING AN AREA OF GRASS

Now you have your clump of grass you can use this to populate surface. I found using individual strands was difficult, as the scatter we will use only really does up to around 70,000 instances before becoming a bit unstable. So if you use a clump of grass then you can spread further with less. Other options of scattering grass include pFlow and vray scatter; which I’ll go over later.

So now make a plane or use splines to create a free form extruded shape, or even detach a polygon from a surface to make a start. Remember when you extrude though to extrude 0 amount and only cap one end otherwise the grass will go underground as well. Also watch with way your normals go.

To make a scatter object of grass do the following:

• Make a compound object (on the create tab) with the grass selected and choose scatter.
• Then pick the plane as the distribution object.
• Change the duplicates to 1000
• Distribute using area
• Change rotation to 360 in the Z to mix up the direction. You can just limit this to 180 or 90 to simulate wind in a particular direction depending on the way your grass clump faces.
• Change scaling to 25% for all XYZ to give some variation
• Show Mesh with 100% to see exactly what will render, and when happy with the result change this to 10% and proxy to speed up your viewport.

Now you have a grass patch. The following is an example of how you can change the grass size on the sub-object scale and even add other simple plane flowers etc to add detail (click on it to enlarge). You can even mix grasses and flowers by using the same distribution object. Simple and no money spent… apart from Max of course.

ALTERNATIVES TO SCATTER

There are other ways of distributing grass. Peter Guthrie mentions the excellent VRay Scatter (www.rendering.ru/index.php/plugins/vrayscatter/), which has the advantage of varying colours more randomly then a multi-sub will do, and also varies the scale by a greyscale bitmap. The scatter method above has no method like this for varying and blending heights. The only problem is it’s a bit buggy (as if Max isn’t!), and it costs.

You could also use PFlow. I’ve had a quick go with this, but haven’t managed to vary the scale by a bitmap yet like VRay Scatter will do, just done density by material.

You will need a group of different grasses and some type of mesh as a distribution object. And obviously create a PF source and click on Particle View to get the following image.

Here’s how you might do this…

• Birth 3000
• Add a Position object, and add distribution object and you can use a greyscale image on a standard material to drive the density of the plants. You will have to view this standard material in a shaded viewport then activate. Weird I know.
• Rotation random horizontal, divergence at 180 and tick restrict diverg. to axis Z (1.0)
• Add Shape Instance and pick the group and tick “group members”. Scale variation 50%, and if animated tick animated shape and offset the timing by random 7 frames or whatever suits your animation.

Hope that may help someone out there! Enjoy.

Real-Time Immersive Design Collaboration: Conceptualising, Prototyping and Experiencing Design Ideas.

Ralph JOHNS & James SHAW
School of Design,
Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand
ralph.johns@vuw.ac.nz
james.shaw@vuw.ac.nz

MOVIES:

Bonnie Robin
Richard Herries
Simon Stantiall

ABSTRACT:

This paper discusses a collaborative trans-disciplinary virtual design studio project in which students designed in teams immersed within a real-time gaming environment. Students of Landscape Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Industrial Design participated in the project at the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand which investigated the effects of real-time immersion on the initial stages of a collaborative design process. In particular, the project explored how real-time immersion affects concept generation, design team collaboration, and peer critique.

Teams of four individuals generated design concepts working solely within an immersive first-person environment – a modification (Garry’s Mod 8.3a) of the Half-Life 2 gaming engine. The ability to control and interact with a wide range of in-game objects in Garry’s Mod allowed design students to visually create, prototype and experience spatial and formal scenarios in real-time. Multi-player technology enabled the design team to be virtually present at the site of construction and to design while actively building.

Students were able to make on-the-fly design decisions in response to work by other team members; when objects were picked up, dropped, rolled, floated and connected together they could immediately see and experience the result of their design actions and respond accordingly. Team members could interact on-line with each other to cooperatively construct a design in which each team member’s decisions became integrated with their peers work in real-time. Design issues such as response to site, composition and conceptual design were interrogated and critiqued within the virtual studio environment resulting in high levels of collaborative design debate, negotiation and interaction.

It was found that the virtual environment enabled rapid prototyping and testing of design iterations which extended the creative conceptual design possibilities put forward by team members. In addition, through first-person immersion and interaction with design ideas from the beginning of the process students were able to design the experience not just the form.

KEYWORDS: collaborative design; virtual teams; real-time gaming engine;

LINK to full pdf (www.jamesshaw.co.nz/downloads/jodr_ralph_johns_james_shaw.pdf)

In June 2006, Associate Professor Daniel Brown, Lecturer James Shaw, and design graduate Erika Kruger were selected by the city of Rome as invited artists in the new Tevereterno (Eternal Tiber) Project, part of the annual Rome Midsummer’s Arts Festival.

Four final-year Architecture and Design students were selected to go to Rome, representing the four disciplines of the Faculty: Justin Beckerman (Architecture), David Angus (Interior Architecture), Hugh Smith (Landscape Architecture), and Johann Nortje (Industrial Design).

Tevereterno is an international contemporary public art project dedicated to celebrating the Tiber River and its central role in the history of Rome. It is the brainchild of Kristin Jones, a New York- and Rome-based artist.

The intent of Tevereterno is to highlight the Tiber River after centuries of neglect. Its mission is to both expose new audiences to large-scale contemporary art in public spaces, and to contribute to the Tiber River’s revival.

Last year, Tevereterno presented the first event on the site, which was attended by over 4,000 people. This year, on June 21, an all night programme of events was presented, entitled Ombre dal Lupercale (Shadows from the Realm of Wolves) which was attended by over 10,000 people.

Six international visual artists were paired with six composers to create animations projected onto the 12-metre high walls of the Tiber River on the night of the summer solstice, midsummer’s eve. Some 12 grand She-Wolf silhouettes had been etched on the travertine walls by cleaning the patina of hundreds of centuries of grime – the ‘She Wolf’ being the most important mythological figure in the birth of Rome.

The event began at sunrise and ended at dawn. The Victoria University team was invited to provide the animations for the event finale at sunrise.

To initiate the all-night event, the Victoria team set 2758 lit candles (marking the years of Rome’s history) along the edges of the river, to the accompaniment of a harmonic choir.

Each of the first five invited animators projected their works at prescribed times throughout the night, five depictions of the She-Wolf returning to life.

At the hour before sunrise, the team’s animations began. Paired with four instrumental arias interpreting the sounds of Rome, the animations were conceived as ‘arias’ which would return the She-Wolf to sleep at the end of the night.

The four arias integrated the four elements of nature – earth (Tiber walls), water (ripples), fire (sunrise), air (moon) – with the fifth element, the spirit of the She-Wolf, all becoming one again at dawn.

The fourth and final aria began as music, but without an animation. Instead, the Victoria team set free the candles from along the Tiber River banks into the water and allowed them to slowly float down the river at the moment of sunrise, to be extinguished by time and the Tiber. The candles’ flames represented the fifth element, the awakened spirit of the She-Wolf, returning at last to sleep.

The finale was so successful, that the Victoria team has been asked to present these animations as the finale for all future annual Midsummer’s Arts Festivals in Rome.

Another test into using the reactor plugin in 3DSMax with the thought of simulating earthquakes within a 3D package. Research questions include whether this is a viable and efficient methodology in quick simulation as opposed to complex engineering packages and how this form of physics simulation compares with gaming technologies.

Like the “break” example within this section the simulations within 3DSMax are fairly slow and inaccurate, but they look pretty! It seems there are more efficient Newtonian simulation softwares available, including gaming engines such as Half-Life 2. These also have the distinct advantage over more complex, accurate engineering software of supplying the user with real-time feedback into newtonian interactions.

This was an experiment done within 3DSMax using the Biped and Reactor plugins. The character is taken from Unreal Tournamant and then used as a physique/skin/mesh for a Biped skeleton with motion captured movements. The hands and feet are then used as collision volumes within reactor with the bricks defined as rigid bodies.

The purpose of this experiment was to test the “real-time” physics capabilities of 3DSMax in comparison to using gaming technologies. I found the simulation time in Max was extremely long and inaccurate. Unless real-world values are used the simulation becomes unstable, and objects must be seperated to prevent objects moving through one another.

From these trials it was decided to persue other more efficient Newtonian simulations in comparison to physics engines seen in such games as Half-Life 2.

Gaming environments offer massive potential in terms of collaborative and spatial environments for designing. The use of ‘in-game’ modelling tools allows designers to quickly put together and test scenarios and designs, and critque in real-time. The use of physics and material properties for each element or ‘building block’ used presents designers with further possibilites as objects take on materialistic and force dependent constructs.

Gaming environments offer massive potential in terms of collaborative and spatial environments for designing. The use of ‘in-game’ modelling tools allows designers to quickly put together and test scenarios and designs, and critque in real-time. The use of physics and material properties for each element or ‘building block’ used presents designers with further possibilites as objects take on materialistic and force dependent constructs.

Gaming environments offer massive potential in terms of collaborative and spatial environments for designing. The use of ‘in-game’ modelling tools allows designers to quickly put together and test scenarios and designs, and critque in real-time. The use of physics and material properties for each element or ‘building block’ used presents designers with further possibilites as objects take on materialistic and force dependent constructs.

This project looked at creating Architectural form from shifts between 2 dimensional vectors and sectional relationships in an existing site context. The existing site condition was coastal and contained an existing derelict building called the bait shed in Island Bay. This building was sectioned and extruded along movement paths into the water creating a building whose form changed depending on movement within the site itself.

Programmatic inputs were the development of a marine education centre. The building stretched and branched from land into the sea, creating areas of research into this south coast site. A “surge” wall allowed sea currents to sweep the length of the building through a glazed section cut, allowing visitors to section the sea itself.