Grass has more 'holes' in 2.8

Quote from DeKoetsier

Hey everyone,

I really don't want to be complaining, since I can understand how much time you guys are putting in the development of this great piece of software, but I do want to point this one out.

In the past version 2.7 the grass was filling up the whole area very even and it looked like freshly shaven grass. (Which is what my customer really wants). Now, even with variety on 0 and grass on 0 or 15 or 30, etc. it looks like there are all 'holes' in between the plumes because the grass plumes are bigger. For wild grass this is nice, but for a lawn, not so much.

I really don't want to be complaining too, but I still find the grass too high even if you set it in short grass.

DeKoetsier's pictures look the same as mine.

An Airplane shot over jungle.

Unfortunately the carpet setting cannot be used either.

Please invest the work for real carpet and grass as for grass animation.

I still love Enscape

I agree, it feels like the min and max height for the grass is a bit arbitrary... I've had instances where I both want the grass to be shorter (trying to make a turf material which would be very short, like a putting green), or longer (for a field or a planter with wild grasses, which could be as long as a couple feet). It would be nice if we could have that control over the slider - I get it may not look as good but I'd rather an option that doesn't look great than not being able to do it at all (bump-maps for short grass only work if you're far enough away, and I don't want to have to manually place hundreds of grass assets to mimic a field).

To the original poster's point - I haven't checked out the newest version of Enscape so I'm not sure if this is how it works, but is it possible the "clumping" of the grass is due to a wind setting?

EDIT: While we're on the subject of grass...I'd also love the ability to have multiple grass materials, each with their own height setting. Sometimes I want to have two different types of grass in the same render view (an area that is mowed or is turf, vs a longer, wilder area, for example).

I agree, this grass doesn't work well for simple clean lawns, I do miss the grass from 2.7. This just looks very fluffy, which I understand probably has something to do with the fur/carpet system, but please make these 2 things separate from each other.

Quote from DeKoetsier

Is there a possibility that we have a choice of grasses in the future? Because to be honest, I liked the 2.7 grass more, so for now I have installed the old png again, which mainly does the trick to fill up the holes again.

Could you please explain how you did this - I would love to fix.

Herbo’s fix is a very clever workaround but I have to admit, I very much dislike this new grass system. One of my favorite Enscape features was the grass. It was simple, looked great and worked well. You didn’t have to fuss with plugins or proxies and you could achieve different looks just by swapping out the base material texture. This new fluffy grass made up of rotated planes is messy and looks really bad. I’m not sure who even let this out the door like this. I know people asked for fur but this isn’t the way to get it. Also, who wants grass swaying in the wind? I can see very tall grasses but just a normal cut lawn doesn’t need to animate. That’s excessive and looks cheesy in renders.