This page provides a brief overview of the 3D grass material. For information on the settings for the 3D grass material, see Settings for the 3D Grass Material.
With the customizable 3D grass material in Twinmotion, you can instantly add photorealistic three-dimensional grass to objects and surfaces in your scene. Suitable for most surfaces in architectural scenes, it can be applied to large or small surfaces (down to 4 cm) by dragging the material from the Twinmotion Library into the scene.
Once the 3D grass is applied to a surface, you can experiment with the look and feel by selecting one of the ready-to-use presets, composed of specific grass types and accent meshes, or by selecting the grass type you prefer, and optionally, add accent meshes.
You can customize several other aspects of the 3D grass and save the changes as personal presets, for example by:
Randomizing the grass types, and adjusting the scale, cut, fuzziness, and spawning angle of the grass.
Inserting various types of accent meshes such as weeds, flowers, and mushrooms.
Adjusting the color of the grass, including the variation and intensity, and adding a dry grass effect.
Specifying whether or not it is affected by the wind and weather settings in Twinmotion.
Adding various lawn mowing patterns and customizing them.
The 3D grass is composed of 3D meshes that represent the blades of grass and an underlying material that simulates grass and soil.
Like all materials in Twinmotion, the 3D grass automatically:
Adapts to the shape, contour, and angle of any surface or object.
Adjusts to any transformation you make to the geometry of surfaces and objects.
Regenerates automatically in files you reimport into Twinmotion from your design application.
Using the 3D Grass Material
You can find the 3D grass material in the Twinmotion Library under Materials in the 3D grass category.
To apply the 3D grass material, select it in the Twinmotion Library and drag it onto an object or surface in the scene. After the material is applied, you can choose among the different presets, grass types, and accent meshes, as well as customize the settings.
Performance and Quality Settings
The 3D grass material is designed to have minimal impact on rendering time in the viewport, VR mode, and when exporting media. However, you can adjust the rendering quality settings in Twinmotion to optimize performance when working in a scene that contains the 3D grass material.
The rendering quality level you select impacts rendering time and the appearance and viewing quality of the 3D grass material in the viewport and in VR mode. For example:
With the Ultra quality setting, the 3D grass is dense and casts shadows.
With the Low quality setting, the 3D blades of grass do not appear, and only the underlying surface material is visible.
To optimize for performance in the viewport and VR mode, when you set the Quality settings to the Twinmotion default Ultra quality mode, the 3D meshes of the 3D grass are generated up to a distance of 32 meters from the viewport camera. However, the Quality settings do not affect the quality of exported media. Regardless of the quality level you choose, media is always exported using Ultra quality and the 3D grass in media is generated up to a distance of 128 meters from the viewport camera.
For more information about the Quality settings in the Preferences panel, see Twinmotion Preferences.
Limitations
You cannot apply the 3D grass material to imported animated files, animated objects from the Twinmotion library, and animated objects using the Animators (Rotators, Translators, and Exploders).
In Lumen rendering mode, the 3D grass is only visible in SSR reflections. 3D grass that is not visible in the viewport is not visible in reflections.
When using the Lumen rendering mode, the ambient light's shadow contribution can have blotchy artifacts due to Lumen Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI). To eliminate these artifacts, deselect the Lumen SSGI checkbox in the Ambience panel (Render > Global illumination > Lumen).
