Has it ever happened to you that you are just doing fine with your architectural project, and out of nowhere you encounter yourself with the same problem? And is that problem with the grass textures?
Well, it happens to us also, and we just decided to do something about it! So stick around to see how we make our own aerial grass texture, with some very very easy steps. You can also watch the video tutorial here.
Aerial grass texture image
Same problem
When we used to render out our project with “grass” well as you can see, it looked very fake.
And when we tried to lay it over a google earth image of the site, it didn’t look that good, because of very low resolution.
So we just ended up doing was grabbing a “seamless grass texture” and just repeating it all over our project, you can tell it is being repeated millions of times.
And another mistake we notice is that people scale the image up too much, so you can see the detail in the grass from an image that is supposedly very far away.
Download texture
So we start by finding our own grass textures, you can go here and find sites to download texture. Or you can also google free non-comercial textures.
We try to find various textures to merge, because if you take a look at google earth, you may notice that the grass fields are not perfect, they all have different variations of greens, textures, etc.
We decided to download three different textures. Starting with the main texture that will be the main background.
The secondary texture that will be located in the main areas, the grass can have a more saturated quality or appear different from the other texture.
And for the third texture, we tried to find a texture that is visual to a dirt pedestrian path. You know that almost everywhere in the world we always try to walk where we feel is the shortest path. With or without concrete pathways.
Create a pattern
Now once we open our site plan into photoshop. We are going to import each of the three textures we’ve downloaded and we will be making a pattern out of it. Just open the texture, go to edit > define pattern > name your grass pattern.
After selecting the grass areas in the site plan, we created a new solid color layer and by right-clicking, you can choose blending options and select the pattern overlay option, then choose your first pattern. This will be the main texture. Make sure it is not too big or too small when you’re scaling the pattern.
With the selection of the grass areas in our site plan and the pattern layer, we created a mask layer. So you can see the grass pattern only in your selection. With the clone stamp tool, we are going to erase any visible seams.
We create a pattern out of the secondary texture.
And here, with the main and secondary texture, we will be using a brush, you can use a “grass” brush or a “bush” brush to erase the main texture so you can have the secondary texture visible.
And just like that, you will be noticing that this aerial image is starting to look like any google earth image. With two different grass textures.
Finally, we will do the same with the pedestrian dirt texture, we create a pattern, and then apply it to our solid color layer as a pattern overlay option in the blending options.
Once you have created a mask of this texture, you will use a thin brush and just start drawing of what would be a pedestrian path in your project. You can vary the opacity in these paths.
Final touches
We liked how the image turned out, obviously, we adjusted the hue/saturation, we added some shadows and some trees. Did you like how it turned out? Take a look at the video tutorial below.
