Peaceful meadows using biomes
Year: 2025
As I keep getting through the existential crisis, I'm coming back with another Blender art depciting crosses, birds, open space provoking thoughts and other stuff like that. This time I'm learning how to make vegetation in Blender, as I always wanted to give biomes a try.
Another "meant to be 15 mins long" tutorial turned into weeks of try and error. Damn, if I only knew it would take so much time to complete!
I used Gscatter, it's a free plugin for Blender. It comes with a set of biomes, but the biomes are very high poly. Unlike Unreal Engine, which automatically makes use of Nanites or LODs to turn meshes into sprites or low poly at the distance, this Blender plugin apparently isn't capable of doing so: even the smallest piece of grass is a full mesh at the distance of 100 meters from the camera.
That's why on vast surfaces Blender starts having a hard time and starts to choke. Moreover, it was more or less fine for the time being, but after a few restarts without any apparent reason it started crashing. Now I know why big studios don't use free software: something goes pear-shaped and you go find the cause of the issue stalling the production.
To limit the amount of grass in the scene I did three things:
- Deleted all ground geometry outside the camera view.
- Just after adding the biome I immediately switched over to proxies (I am suprised the plugin doesn't do that by default).
- Used a particle system of type "hair" to make grass on far away areas. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for such a simple scene. The system uses the color of the texture to derive the hair color from, and I can see the color of the far grass doesn't quite match the closer one. I guess the texture diffuse color could be tweaked to make the distinction less noticeable.
The next challenge was to render the thing. Apparently, Blender realized the assets won't fit into GPU memory, so it gave the RAM + CPU a shot. No luck, the process was still running OOM and crashing. So I ended up purchasing more RAM only to get this stupid scene done 🫠
The road was created using the inversion of a vertex weight mask. The material could be improved, but I already spent too much time on the scene, I had to move on. The clouds are standard cheap sprite-based ones I use in every scene, even though at some point I would like to learn how to make them more good looking.
The final result was tuned a bit using post-processing with Blender compositing, to make colors look more juicy.
The bird and the cross were AI-generated with MeshyAI and Tripo3d respectively.
Learned this time
- How to make easy grass using a particle system
- How to make good looking grass using biomes with Gscatter
- Biomes in Blender are pain on weak GPUs
- Biomes need lots of RAM to render
- AI generated assets can be great deal of help
