Blender Master Class

Other Uses for Particle Systems

In addition to modeling hair and fur, Blender’s particle systems are useful for numerous other tasks. For example, for the Jungle Temple, I used a particle system to create patches of grass on the ground, using the Group render type to duplicate a few different grass objects many times.

Grass for the Jungle Temple

While I placed most of the plants in the Jungle Temple scene by hand, I used a particle system to generate some grass around my scene. While hair strands on their own can look a lot like grass with the right materials, I chose to create models for the individual blades of grass. Then, I used a particle system to scatter them around the scene, as shown in Figure 9-15.

Figure 9-14. Using a texture ...