there are many ways to create a field of grass in 3dsmax, the method you choose is depending on how you want to look it like – here’s a very short list of some workflows to achieve convincing results. first of all create a plane representing the field which you want to grow grass on. then choose a method listed below. there may be more ways to achieve useful results, so please don’t hesitate to add comments!
a) the vray/ mental ray way
open the material editor, pick a vray material und put a nice seamless grass texture into the diffuse channel. drop this material on your plane. then add a uvw map modifier to it, planar mapping, put also a noise modifier on top of this and last but not least pick the vray displacement modifier and choose your grass as the texmap again. set 2d mapping and render it. ideally turn on gi with irradiance map, but be careful for the secondary bounces, it can kill your render time – so better turn it off (inspired by vray.info).
oh yes, mental ray users do have an easy way to do this, too: just take the mental ray material und use the displacement in extended shader params and take a green texture as height map – that’s it. easy as 1-2-3 resulting into pro results. don’t forget to switch the renderer to mental ray else it will look terrible.
b) the old fashioned way
‘old fashioned’ because it doesn’t need any modern renderer and can be done with standard 3dsmax tools by scattering grass leaf meshes all over the plane: activate the plane, add a noise modifier to ‘unflatten’ it. now switch your mind to grass leaf creating mode: create a simple plane with 3 length segments, add edit poly and move the vertices so that it looks like a flat grass leaf (something like a long triangle). let’s bend it and don’t forget to move the pivot point to the base of the mesh. while the leaf is selected, go to the create tab and choose compound objects where you’ll find the scatter object and choose the plane as the distribution object. first you won’t see any effect, but as soon as you increase the duplicates in source object parameters things start growing nicely. distribution type: area, play around with the transforms. for material of the grass, just take a gradient ramp with some noise in it, dark to bright green (inspired by treddi.com).
c) the plugin way
since 3dsmax 7.5 we do have the fabulous hairfx plug-in integrated by default, so grass is like the hair of mother earth isn’t it? let’s go: just add the hair and fur modifier, select the ‘tall grass’ preset to have a good start and optimize the parameters. it just can’t be easier (inspired by the 3dsmax reference manual).
d) the fake way
last but not least there’s a method which is extremely render time friendly and can be just the right way in some cases: with crossed planes containing flat grass textures (grass laeves from the side) and transparency. it’s nearly the same as method b, but you take these planes and scatter it on the ground, too. this is a common method for scenes used in real time environments.