#maxwell grass

Until the end of 2016, my grass presets are on sale for $79. Make your renderings look better and save yourself time doing it. Upgrade your tool kit and make yourself more valuable!

First, I want to thank you for visiting Method this year. It's my hope that you've learned new skills and workflows from my tutorials and articles. The world needs great architects, and it's my goal to make you worth more to the industry and to your clients.  The Method website is a labor of love for me and I want to be able to even more in 2015. Please let me know how I can help you. Simply email me to do so. 

Get Grass!

Here at Method, I'm closing out 2014 by celebrating you! You've worked hard this year, and I want you to start 2015 off right with some new tools that will make you worth more. 

Until the end of the year, my Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack can be yours for only $79. That's 20% off the regular price. It works with Maxwell Render v2.7 and newer along with SketchUp or FormZ/Bonzai3d. 

How will the Preset Pack make you worth more?

No more trial and error. You'll save huge amounts of time setting up grass in your scenes with my presets and photo-real materials. 

You'll have a set of tools you'll be able to use time and time again, increasing your productivity in every scene you put grass into.

Your renders will look even better than they already do, which will raise the value of your services, and allow you to charge more!

Watch this short video to see what it's all about:

Not only do you get the 17 presets and materials... buyers also get example scene files and TWO bonus training videos to take your skills to the next level.

This deal is good until midnight EST / 9pm PST. At that time the price goes back to $99.

So get that tax write-off before 2014 comes to an end and make yourself worth more with my Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack.

Happy rendering!

Get Grass!

This is just a short piece of the much longer, informative video tutorials that come with the Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack that you can purchase here.

Methodcast Quickies are back! Here's a little tutorial that will teach you how to get Maxwell Materials into SketchUp. If you're new to using Maxwell Render, you'll find this step-by-step guide a huge time saver for getting ultra-realistic Maxwell materials into SketchUp. We all know the materials we use in SketchUp are the most basic there are, but what if you want to get things like frosted glass, cobblestone, textured wood, or board-form concrete in your scene? This trick will get your images looking better in no time when you use Maxwell Render and their sophisticated materials. Did you know you can get Maxwell Render for SketchUp for free? See below for the link.

Take your images to the next level!

Find out more about the Maxwell Grass Preset Pack here. I'd love it if you bought a copy and share what you make with it. Your purchases help support this site directly.

Get tons of free Maxwell Materials at Next Limit.

Get the free version of Maxwell Render for SketchUp here.

Learn something? Please leave a tip in the tip jar below! My tutorials are free but I can only make more if you donate.

These are recent images I've made (click/tap for larger versions) since learning some of the new features in the newly released Maxwell version 3. The ability to use Scatter to randomly place (and scale and rotate) objects is a big deal. This scene also makes use of the MXI Place tool which allowed me to place referenced files into my 3d scene without any file size penalty. There are actually only two objects in the scene: both  the ground planes made from a single NURBS surface - one for the underlying grass placement map which determines where the grass blades grow and another copy directly above it for the ground texture itself. All of the other stuff is coming into the scene at render time via referenced external files.

Maxwell Scatter

Scatter is a much-needed development and these images show why. Previously when doing our renderings, placing true 3d trees, plants, grass and rocks was painful. This makes it easy. Through the plugin interface in FormZ, I told Maxwell to randomly scale the trees within 20% of their original size in any direction and randomly rotate them along the Z axis on my single NURBS surface. This gave me the variety I was looking for while only referencing a single tree model. With the medium and small rocks, I gave Maxwell more latitude to use it's random magic both in scale and rotation for even more variation. All of those rocks are actually the same rock model. 

Then I used the MXI Place tool to specifically place my larger rocks (again, externally referenced models) exactly where I wanted them to appear in the scene.

Maxwell Grass

Last, I didn't want a default thick blanket of grass covering the hills. I made a quick placement map in Pixelmator to specify where one the grass presets from my Maxwell Grass Preset Pack would show up in the scene in a natural looking way. I simply loaded up the preset into the Maxwell Grass extension in FormZ, and it gave me the look I wanted for the ground plane itself.

With a few adjustments of the camera settings I was able to achieve a subtle depth of field in the rendered view.

Here are some fun scene stats:

10,000 small size rocks via Maxwell Scatter (a single rock model randomly rotated and scaled)

2,000 medium size rocks via Maxwell Scatter (the same single rock model randomly rotated and scaled)

7 large rocks - hand placed as MXI references

350 3d trees - modeled in the TreeSketch3 iPad app (free on the iOS App Store, and I have another tutorial here on how to get them into FormZ/Bonzai3d)

1200 medium grass blades per square foot with placement map - placed using the Maxwell Grass extension (via my Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack)

500 small grass blades per square foot with placement map  - placed using the Maxwell Grass extension (via my Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack)

2 NURBS surfaces for the ground plane - once for the placement map and one slightly above it for the ground cover texture.

By my calculations, there are 23,744,359 objects in the scene (give or take). Twenty-three million! Of course each tree is a 45 MB FormZ file with 150,000 faces totaling another 52 million polygons all by themselves, but the scene is very fast (see image at the bottom) because of the file referencing introduced in Maxwell 3. 

All of this to show that the new features in Maxwell 3 are awesome, and I've only used a few of them.

Behind the scenes

Here's a screen shot of the simple scene that shows the NURBS ground plane and the referenced large rocks which are placed individually using the MXI Place tool. It doesn't get any simpler than this as far as scenes go. All of the magic happens at render time, saving us designers tons of time by keeping the project light. If all of those rocks, trees and grass blades were to actually be inside the model, it would be an unusable mess. 

 The Verdict

I am SO proud to announce that my grass presets are now available for SketchUp users who render with Maxwell! You've been asking for it. Here it is!

Are you sick of those terribly obvious tiling textures of grass in your renderings? Do you want to have more options for plants that don't weigh down your model and just magically appear (perfectly I might add) only when you render saving you TONS of time? Do you want to get grass (and more) the fast and easy way? ME TOO.

Check it out - I made something.

My goal is to make you worth more, and these presets will do just that. With them, you'll be able to instantly add 3d, photo-real grass, bamboo, horsetail reed, straw and more to your 3d scenes and renderings. And I have to say they are gorgeous thanks to the amazing rendering program we love called Maxwell. They are so easy to use it's a no-brainer because your images are going to go to the next level.

No more of those terrible tiling textures covering acres of grass. It's time for the real thing!

Special bonus time!

Of course no offer from Method would be complete without a tutorial. This preset pack actually comes with 2 bonus tutorial videos included for zero dollars extra.

The first video goes into every detail about how to use the presets. Every. Detail.

The second video builds on the first and shows you how to use placement maps to control where the growth happens on your geometry. This tutorial alone will take your skills to the next level because nowhere else on the internet does this tutorial exist! I finally cracked the code and now I can share it with you.

A little history

First I made this for me. I spent hundreds of hours creating and tweaking these presets and materials over the last year. Then I thought you could probably use it too. So I bundled it all together and even made some videos to teach you how to use it.

I hope you love using it as much as I've had creating it. I'm sure it'll help take your skills and renderings to the next level.

I have some awesome news that I'm finally able to share with you. I'm launching my first product! I'm so excited to put this out into the world because it's something that has helped me time and time again.

Helped with what? I'm so glad you asked. 

We all do renderings of our architectural projects and are using some amazing modeling and rendering tools. I'm eyeball-deep in FormZ/Bonzai3d and Maxwell Render. They are some seriously fun and powerful tools that make my projects look great without a ton of effort. I decided last year to start making my own custom presets to take my renderings to the next level. Like I said, they have really made my images look great, and now I'm making them available to you!

Don't just take my word for it. You've probably seen a couple of renderings I've put up on the web lately teasing this new product. It's finally here!

So check out the new Method store where you can see everything all in one place - tons of renderings, what's included, how it works, and how it can help make you a rendering rock star!

And for the first week, I'm running a special that takes $20 off, so get it at that price while you can. 

I hope you love it as much as I do. 

…and can I just say that the bonus tutorial videos are worth more than the price alone. There's so much great stuff packed into them, you're going to learn a ton. You might consider buying the presets just to get the tutorials!

Learn more about the Maxwell Grass Preset Pro Pack