Grass and grasses... and stuff
Use the same faux fur and a pair of scissors!
Or, if you're doing a large area use the Wahl trimmers they're getting the oil for.
Here I kick into mad ideas mode...
Even a lawn is rarely made up of just one grass. Anyone here who aims for a "perfect lawn" has probably just gone and beaten their head on the wall :cry: Sorry!
A lot of the "green" colour of a lawn is actually moss while a chunk of it is broad leaf weeds that can grow so flat that even the best mowers miss them. Again the lawn experts will know only too well that when you put selective weed killers on your lovely green lawn it always seems like 3/4 of it promptly turns brown.
What's the point I'm getting at?
I think...
I don't know because I haven't tried this yet... that
part of getting really good grass is going to be the idea of building it up in layers - just like the stuff I posted on trees.
If you are going for manicured grass it may well be more difficult... you will need to get all the elements of variation within an extremely thin layer that is all (or almost all) in direct line of sight... i.e. it's as bad as painting a varnished passenger car side... except here you want
some texture.
That word "some" is critical.
I think, but I don't know, that what we are dealing with is the fact that when we look out of a window we briefly see a "green" lawn.
1.
Unless there is a lovable child, the neighbour's cat doing a poo, the dog burying a bone or a SWAT team member on it we will think no more, our brain won't engage and - the world being "normal" and non-threatening - we will carry on with no more thought on the subject.
2.
We don't even question the idea that grass is "green"... when we all know very well that much of the time it is yellow, buff, brown and even black.
3.
Okay, so then there's all those plants in it... many of which
are green... of one shade or another.
4.
But I had wandered on to "texture". Well... what "texture" we see - if any - (on a manicured lawn) is going to be made up of three things.
a. the numerous different plant colours.
b. the millions of bits of plant all busily doing nothing but grow while light bounces back off of them in all sorts of
directions - some of which come to our eyes.
c. the variety of leaf size, shape, thickness and a whole bunch of other stuff.
So... I would suggest two things for a manicured lawn...
1. Whatever "medium" we are using to represent the millions of tiny bits of plant it shouldn't be uniform in either
texture or colour. The variation in both need only be extremely small though,
2. I suspect that part of producing the desired variation may be achieved by two things.
a. the obvious trick of mixing components before casting or spraying them on the
modelled surface.
b. the less obvious trick of going over and over the area several times so that the final
result is built up. This will tie in with what I've said about getting trees right and what
I will come to on long grass.
Need to go and do things.
Is this useful?
