"We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively" [Bill Hicks]

V 0.7 and therefore the offical first version of SuperGrass sqrt(2) has been released. You can pick it up from the download section. As mentioned before it is for 3D Studio Max version 2009 only. New features include

• Auto optimization for large lawn structures. It will auto downsize the number of polygons used in each indivual blade or bundle if a certain theshold value is exceeded. This should allow for much larger lawns with a higher number of blades and bundles even under 32bit. This will reduces the number of polygons upto a factor of four without any visual impacts.
• Mental ray shader now supports final gathering correctly and therefore should work now nicely with the 3ds Max skylight.

Unfortunately so far not much feedback has been received. Therefore, further development of this plug-in might be put on rather low priority. If you do not want to see this to happen just send us an email at

Yes SuperGrass is back. After development has stopped more than two years ago simply because of lack of time and focus on other projects. Afterwards the source code was believed to have been lost in the digital ether. Fortunately, a version was found on a USB stick a couple of weeks ago. So theroetically speaking the development could continue. The first thing that was done was to compile the Plug-in and mental ray shader to a newer version of 3D Studio max, the old Plug-in was only compatible to 3D Studio Max V9. Unfortunately at the moment we only have access to 3D Studio max Version 2009. The download section contains a link to the new build as well as the old version that was compatible from 3D Studio Max 7 to 3D Studio Max 9.

If the development on SuperGrass will be continued basically depends on you! Since there is only a finite amount of time possible to spend it is worth knowing if there is actually any demand to continue with this project or not. So how can you help to make this decission. Simply tell us if you would like development continued and what features you would like to see to be added in the future? For example would you like to focus us more on the mental ray side of things, eventually moving the whole functionality into mental ray standalone shaders and therefore making it accessible to other applications besides Autodesk 3D Studio Max ? If there are enough encouraging enquiries development will contine and a user forum will be set up. Simply just email us at

and tell us your opinion.