In this simple, quick little one-off I was playing with grass. Given enough memory, you can do an astounding number of particles, which makes doing grass very simple, using the same exact particle trick as for forests. In this one-off, I spent the bulk of my time writing scripts to help with my workflow.

I begin with sculpting the terrain, but from there I have to do a bunch of painting. I have to paint areas of grass and dirt, I have to paint areas of cliff, and I have to paint areas for the various vegetation maps. The grass and cliff blends are textures, but the vegetation layers are all vertex groups, so I have been digging in the Python API to write a script that can set a vertex group layer's weights based on a texture. This lets me paint areas of vegetation corresponding to the grass and cliff maps, and have it set the weights accordingly. From there, I can take it into weight paint mode to do final touchup.

I really wish I had my doodads files from GC, though. I have some more meticulously modeled grass and plant models at home, that look better than the quick one-off grass I did for the scene above. They would at least provide for more variation.

This'll probably be the last time I post about landscapes in Blender. The rest of the week is going to be kind of busy, and when I get back I have other stuff to work on, including some character modeling.