3D Splanchnic Shows How to Use MASH to Distribute Grass as Arnold Stand-ins to Create a Grass Field.

Working in Maya, you quickly realize that there are many ways that you could create something like a grass field. You have paint effects, xGen, MASH, and it’s even possible using hair and fur systems. This time, however, 3D Splanchnic shows how you can distribute grass using Maya’s Motion Graphics Toolkit, MASH to distribute modeled grass objects as Arnold Stand-ins.

The grass objects come from PaintFX, and the converted meshes are the base of the technique. Creating a Stand-in for the grass is a great way to create massively complex scenes efficiently. Stand-ins let you keep your working scene nice and light by only loading the geometry at render time. Working this way makes it feasible to create a lot of geometry for the grass field without being too taxing on your system.

The tutorial also covers how to create a texture map to control local visibility.