how do i make straw in max 4.2?

[lillypusher]

which basically covers it. i need a straw roof, like the one on huts ot tropical bars. how do i get a decent straw material? i tried using opacity maps, with sraw material, didn't look 2 good. tried using splines - not exactly what i was going for. can anyone give me a hand here?

thanks...

[Chris-3DT]

good question indeed, i would like an answer to this too

[lillypusher]

*lol*

i was counting on u, u know....

[kuman]

hmm

well if its hi poly pre render stuff you're looking to do, you can try someting like shag hair to do the straw. if you don't have that plugin and can't shell out the cash for it (i know plugins are real expensive) there's a script called advanced painter that does scattering by brush stroke (http://maxres.cgworks.com/scripts/) by mr. saksono who makes many great scripts.

another lower poly approach is to use textures. get a staw texture and maniuplate it in pshop such that it doesn't have a very heavy color gradient from one end to another which will really look tiled. now map it onto a plane with opacity at the tip, chances are you'll have to really take some time to tweak the texture and paint the opacity to make it look good. now do some operations on the plane to distort it a bit, and try to build a roof from many of these planes. like maybe 100 of them. that should give you a layered look to your roof.

ofcourse another way to try is a hybrid of the two. say an underlying layer of thatch that's texture with an overlying layer that's say shag hair, that will probably give you a good look at a moderate cost in terms of render time.

good luck
-k

[Chris-3DT]

thanks man

i`ve tried creating a box with 200 length segments and applied a wave modifier (many, many, many tiny waves) and a noise modifier.

this might be enough for long distance shots, if you apply a photo-texture of a reet-roof.

got such a texture? i could try it but i don`t have that sort of texmap.

[kuman]

here's a few

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture/straw/

not that great but they might do. if you look at straw1 and straw2. you can use the combination of the two to probably create a reasonable texture. just colorize straw 1 and paint the opacity and it might be reasonably good.

of course another thing to try is to just make your own straw texture. scatter a few splines give em some noise give them a gradient texture and render them out from the top view and you'll have your texture and opacity map (apply a white texture with self illum 100 and save off).

good luck
-k

[lillypusher]

thank u both, i'm sorry i was tied up at work or i would have got back 2 u sooner.
anyways, seeing as my boss was anxious to get the job done, and the straw wasn't his top priorty, i just used a 10 height seg box, FFD'd it a bit, and slapped a quick straw texture on it. looked more or less terrible, but i'll have to figure out the best way to do it in my own time (over the weekend, hopefully).

again, thanks for the advice - and the links.