How to mow the Lawn with a Blender - Setup & Tutorial

HOW TO MOW THE LAWN WITH A BLENDER ?Who will mow the lawn ? In most families owning a garden, this question often comes withthe weed-end. I’m sure that you would prefer to play with Blender ! What is the commonpoint between a blender and a lawn mower ? They both have rotating blades ! So, you have agood reason to stay in front of your computer and mow virtual grass !This tutorial and setup have been inspired by the excellent video tutorial about makingrealistic grass, written by Andrew Price on blenderguru.com. His materials and lighting setupare really awesome. I have enjoyed playing with them.Last year, I had done some countryside scenes with animated grass, but I had used acompletely different method to animate the grass, based on a mesh hidden underneath theground surface, animated by a displacement texture.Andrew’s method to simulate the wind and animate the grass is based on a moving texturedriven by an empty. This texture is used by a Field, set to wind. The texture used is aprocedural Marble texture.After reading his tutorial, the first idea that came to my mind was : great, we have nice grass,but now... how to mow the lawn in an animation ? The answer was : By using textures tocontrol the hair particles.Textures moved by an object or an empty used as reference have plenty of uses. In GIMP orany other image editor, you can create textures with specific patterns to achieve all kinds ofinteresting effects. On my site, you will find a tutorial ...