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Tutorial/Asset: Moss! (Patreon)

Published:
2021-01-31 13:15:42
Edited:
2021-01-31 13:15:46
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[Download below]First are foremost- there's probably a better way to do moss! Some wild displacement/volumetric solution. This is just the best way I've found so far! I have ten bazillion things I should probably be working on instead, but gosh darn I had to get it out of my system. I'm releasing this to all the tiers for a few reasons! 1.) We crossed 4,000 folks here! That's amazing!!! You guys have surpassed paying my bills, so I'm saving up so that as soon as it's safe to do so, I can do a proper film shoot- which has been my biggest life dream since I was a kid, so thank you so much!!! I'll keep you in the loop about how stuff's looking :D  2.) I don't think it's an asset most people actually need, so I'm casting a "wide net"? 3.) It's fairly geometry intensive solution (depending on how you go about it), and I feel bad about that (sorry laptop folks) and, 4.) We all need to play with Blender's built-in Scatter addon more. Download (right click, save as):Here's the blend file! I'll do some work to see if I can make it at all practical as an FBX tomorrow. At the very least some of the textures could be useful! 

Files

Moss! A few different ways.

First and foremost- there's probably a better way to do moss! Some wild displacement/volumetric solution. This is just the best way I've found so far, and I'm kinda into it :). I have ten bazillion things I should probably be working on instead, but gosh darn I had to get it out of my system. I'm releasing this to all the tiers for a few reasons! 1.) We crossed 4,000 folks here! That's amazing!!! You guys have surpassed paying my bills, so I've been saving up so that as soon as it's safe to do so, I can do a big proper film shoot- which has been my biggest life dream, so thank you so much!!! T 2.) I don't think it's an asset most people actually need? 3.) It's fairly geometry intensive solution, and I feel bad about that and 4.) We all need to play with Blender's built-in Scatter addon more. You can download the moss stuff on the patreon post! Not sure how many of you click through to the video without even seeing the post :P

Comments

Raja Nandepu

Congrats for reaching 4K ! cant wait to see your future stuff !

bittergourd

You're having WAY too much fun, Ian! And yes, hooray to our PNW mossy overlords!

bittergourd

Also, now I want chocolate chip no bake cookies! DAMN IT, IAN!

Basil

Thanks so much! Going to add this to give my mechanical builds some depth

Mornarion

Congratulations! It's still way below what you deserve, but 4K is a good number. And, since I'm into medieval stuff more than cyberpunk, this kind of assets are so handy to me 😘

g1ft3d

Wow this is very cool cant wait to put moss on everything, thanks

Julian Schenini

I got corona so im heavily isolating, home alone, and you trlly give me a smile. Thank you, Ian. For the knowledge, the laughs, and the inspiration (im in a batch where I dont know what do create for work and im delayed)

Jonas Bethge

Hey Ian, great video as always and congrats on the 4K! Thanks for the assets! I'll post a question here again which I imagine would be a super boring video for you to make but I am just so curious... What does your file management look like??? What kind of back-ups, naming conventions, folder hierarchies etc. do you have to make sure you'll never loose assets, textures, previous versions and so on? Is some of it in a cloud storage, do you ever pack textures, how often do you back up in general..? Even if it's actually an imperfect and somewhat messy system like most people's, I'd be just be curious how you manage to stay on top of things. Obviously, I completely understand that you have other stuff to do though - it's just a suggestion. Thanks anyway :)

Jonas

i might be wrong about this but i think you dont need to write scatter objects everytime, you can just hit f3 enter after you wrote it once :)

Jeff Betz

Ian, you’re awesome. Thank you. Get some sleep. Also, I hope everything is alright with that doc visit.

Blake Rizzo

MOSSSS. And super congrats on over 4K!!!!!

Paul Spooner

Beautiful! I went to the hardware store one time and asked them what I could put on my lawn to make it grow more moss and they just looked at me weird until I left.

Paul Spooner

When you are using the particle system, you can turn on children and then use the clumping tools instead of using a texture. It has pretty good results, and enough sliders to make it look the way you want most of the time.

IanHubert

I know it looks like that, but it always says the script isn't found if i don't write it in from scratch! No idea why. Drives me a little nuts.

Jonas

Strange, tested it with scatter and worked fine for me

Tom Smith

Very cool! First we had MOTHS! now we have MOSS!

Olof Friström

I did NOT know about the textures thing in the particles, so handy! (also really appreciate the intermittent kitty purrs, 5/5)

judelightning

this scatter tool has huge environment possibilitys thank ian

Erik Carrillo (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 Thanks Ian, im lichen this veeeeeeeeeeeery much<3
2021-02-01 00:49 Thanks Ian, im lichen this veeeeeeeeeeeery much<3

Thanks Ian, im lichen this veeeeeeeeeeeery much<3

IanHubert

Oh dang!! I hope you're doing alright :O That's scary, man! Very glad the videos are a help, but yes!! Take care, Julian!

IanHubert

Hmmmm- I wonder if it's the blender version? Regardless I think I want to add it to the quick menu!!

IanHubert

I think you just hold the de-mosser upside down??

IanHubert

HUH! I haven't played with the clumping tools in- like- forever! Do they also change the height of the clumps? Because yeah the "fuzzy stuff" looked like 5 times better once the clumpiness was introduced- that could be a great way of going about it.

IanHubert

Ahahaha, it's the GPU- I use a notch filter to get rid of most of it (it's SO loud), but I need to figure out a better solution!

Julian Schenini

Hej! Thank to the both of you. I’m Gucci! Positive but healthy, luckily. Appreciate the wishes. Have a good week...and hold !

Dave Wrath

What is the difference between doing the base layer with Geometry Nodes rather than a Particle System, then using scatter to customise and blend the layers? I'm not sure I fully understand Geo Nodes yet so I might be completely missing something?

Neptun3_dev

scatter objects woulda been alot easier then graswald for peter on that ghibli render

David McSween

Submerge entire PC in a bath and call it watercooled :D... much quieter

David McSween

I think that geometry nodes is making (new) real geometry, while particles uses instances which are far less memory intensive.

CallofZON (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 For some reason I can't download most files on your patreon even tho I'm tier 7
2021-02-01 02:06

IanHubert

Wait really?? Do you right click and pick a save option from the right click menu? Just clicking on it won't always work

IanHubert

Graswald comes with all those super rad plant models, though!! Crazy impressive.

Ozzie

I feel like Ian has finally lost his mind in this video after the excruciatingly tedious work put in trying to create believable CG moss to appease the Dark Eldritch Moss Horrors in the shadows of his room. Oh Ian my Ian, tell me my claim isn't true

Baebearr_

try right click> save link as

Prillian Nursetiaji

I got 2 things from this vid, mosses and how to use scatter objects....thanks Ian!

Anonymous

Its funny because I am working on a futuristic thing that happens in a forest so clearly this is the perfect place for me to be lol

Neg suki

If using chrome go to Security Settings, turn off all protection (at least while downloading from here), then right click the link, Save As, at the bottom of the screen it'll say __.blend can't be downloaded security'.. click the ^ button and select 'Keep'

Leo Avero

lily lily lily lily lily pads

Neptun3_dev

very nice models at that, and it was a good look into how its used practically

Neptun3_dev

any Mac users can use "Open Link in New Tab"

Robin Ruud

Ian, I love your songs. When can I buy an album featuring "Everybody loves moss" and "Lily pad"?

Alexander

Thanks, entertaining video and lots to be inspired by as usual! Is it just me or Isn't there a lot of sound noise, both physical and digital? I hate to add more work to the publishing process, but maybe look into getting some kind of external recording device, like a DAC.

Katya Chiu

Thank you, its an awesome tutorial! Lily song is very sticky XD

James Combridge

You know F3 saves your last used function. So you can just type F3 and hit enter once you've done it once XD *edit* No it doesn't.... well thats super annoying

kani thi

Hi everyone I’m a newbie for blender .after getting in I feel really overwhelming. Where should I start from!! Pls help!!

Bryson Spaulding

For me, I did the donut tutorial from Blender Guru online and while there are times where it feels like it drags on, it really teaches you the UI and the flow of how to move around in Blender. Soon you'll get more comfortable and then especially after seeing work from Ian, you'll be inspired to take on new challenges. Like he said in his conference talk back in 2019, "It's like a feeling of leveling up".

kani thi

Thank you sooo muchhh

Chris Keller

This is SUPER cool, I'll have to find something to use it on. :D hah.

Pete Burges

Moths, moss, pigeons...this is gold. I could never be bothered to model and rig a pigeon and then turn it into a particle system just to add some background detail... but because you've done it for me, I'm gonna use it in EVERYTHING. Thanks man!

Theo Creswell

Usually I agree with everything you say however this time I have to formally disagree. Buying every colour of sharpie will make me happy, that is not every colour of sharpie. If you add to your collection you will eventually reach true happiness.

IanHubert

YOU KNOW WHAT- my tune has changed; I have them in a mason jar by my desk and it is Genuinely Excellent.

IanHubert

Yeah I think the donut one is where a lot of folks start! I also keep thinking about making a tutorial that's just, like, "A tutorial that gets you far enough to understand OTHER tutorials"- because honestly I think that could be fairly useful for folks trying to start out? Good luck, Kani!!

IanHubert

QUITE annoying!! I should probably file a bug report. Most other folks aren't having this problem, so I suspect it's a specific blender version issue??

IanHubert

Yeah I've got a notch filter going, but it doesn't quite cut it- I suspect it's a fairly common problem, it's just gotten a bit worse lately since I updated my GPU- I'll try to figure it out! Drives me absolutely nuts :/

Bryon Lape

Moths. Moss. Whatever.... :-)

Davide Bertolini

Laptop folks and people who can't find a new GPU at a price that is not completely outrageous

Pop Scriptum

No joke about Kate Moss, I'm disapointed ;-)

CallofZON (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 Hey Ian is it possible for you to do a tutorial about how to make mechanical and machine parts that you made for that robot kit bash? becuase I'm terrible at making that kinda stuff! I'm just not as good as you!
2021-02-04 03:19

simon wu

Hey, i attempted this tutorial and I just can't seem to get the orientation right with the moss. I tried reseting normals but it didn't work. What should I do?

Carter Burr-Kirven

Using Scatter, or hair particles? As he mentions in the video, hair particles expect the instanced objects to be oriented sideways for whatever reason. Or any chance you've set the Rotation incorrectly in your particle settings? Velocity/Hair should point them along the normals of the object (which is where normals would be relevant if they're pointing inward instead of outward), but you can also point them straight up, sideways, oriented to the world...

simon wu

What about scatter?

Jackie Miller

Hi Simon, I wonder if you need to apply modifiers or other transforms to the object you are scattering on. I scattered lily pads on a plane and they were all flat, but if you then add an ocean modifier to the plane and scatter then they scatter rotated. Apply the ocean modifier to the plane and you can scatter flat again.

simon wu

Thanks Jackie. That was the issue. I had displacement for the rocks

CallofZON (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 When is ians next episode or movie of dynamo releasing?
2021-02-05 13:36

Joel Godin

Quick Menu is so convenient in Blender. After F3 Scatter, right click on it and "Add to Quick Menu". Now just press 'Q' and choose the 'scatter' from the quick menu.

Jay Gonzalez

hey i loved this so much, i was wondering if you could do a video on how to do some post-processing of the final render, i love the way it looks and... i think you added some lens distortion with maybe some depth of field?

iain

Love to the Moss-man. learned a (another) Ton! thanks Ian

Leon Lindemann

I think there's already a video here where Ian's explaining how he does post-processing in both blender and after effects

Gabrial Wolf

A bit late but I just found out Blender has a built in ivy generator

James Combridge

You should check out the node based scattering in the latest builds if you haven't already. Much lighter on your PC than using particles, albiet not quite as much control (yet I'm assuming)

IanHubert

AHH! With geometry nodes? I've only poked at those the littlest bit, but they look like they're going to be filling a big hole blender's had for a while! I'm stoked! :D

IanHubert

I'm trying to send it to the sound team in 2 days, but then it'll still take a couple months for them to wrap up audio. I have a lot more faith in their ability to stay on schedule than my own, though ;P

Petteri Valtiala

Good stuff! The tip about using the cube to select the top normals was great, looks like there's always a way to make things like this easier. Was expecting some weight painting for that, but no! NO! Normals.

tzben000

Amazing stuff!

Anonymous

Did you make a FBX?

Bartek L

Wow that's insane, I had no clue there is Scatter Object and it's so powerful and simple at the same time. I covered a house with MOSS in 5 minutes without having to play with particles.

Phil South

Hey I installed it but it's not finding scatter on F3 for me, what'd I break?

Phil South

WAIT! I found out how to fix it. You have to enable Developer Extras. Move along nothing to see here. :)

Blender Bender

Where did you get the Hdri and Rock texture from, otherwise love the content, best $10 I have ever spent

Nettle

A little late to the game here, but using these assets with the 3.0 beta build's geometry nodes scattering and weight painting is a dream. Not exactly lightweight, but much more reasonable on my laptop than built in scattering or particle systems. Thank you so much for sharing Ian!

julie

is the link broken?

IanHubert

Doesn't look like it- did you right click, save link?? Some of these older posts you have to do that.

Bonk

Something I've discovered as a workaround for the download is right-clicking the hyperlink, clicking 'inspect element' and then clicking the hyperlink in the dev console that has the .blend file at the end. You get an asset and you also get to feel like a cool hacker all at once!

julie

this worked! thanks

Yuto

can i know where the hdri is from? i couldn't find in poly haven