Tooling the grass (background on the lion)

One of the things that I really like about Robb's video lessons is that he has already done all the "thinking". I spent a couple days working on the grass, on and off. It was mostly a lot of beveling and backgrounding, kind of boring. The challenging part was to make sure that where grass blades crossed over each other, they came out on the other side and didn't end abruptly or just disappear. I had to go over some of it several times to get some depth. I'm still not finished with that part, I'll do some more cleaning up later and add some modeling to the individual grass blades. What I wanted to do was be able to see where the blades going to end up in front of the lion because I wanted to cut some of the tips loose in this area. Then when I got to the hairing, I could put hair texture on the areas where the grass had been cut loose.

I've used a couple different backgound textures. A simple checkered texture between the blades of grass, and a different texture around the outside area of the picture. I am thinking this will help when it comes to the coloring portion of the picture. Now I'm ready to move on to the fun part, cutting the hair.