Blender 4.5

• Something that bugged me for a very long time was the lack of a passable middle ground between making grass using textures and using geometry/hair particles. One arguably the fastest but ugliest method while the other one is good looking but expensive. Grass based on image planes is of course another way but it creates a lot of transparent overlap.  Given I already invested a little bit of time into parallax occlusion mapping and parallax rooms, I wanted to explore a solution based on those previous methods. And this is the result. A parallax strand shader that helps simulating a dense patch of grass or fur on any surface without the need of any additional geometry. The shader has a bunch of fine controls to get the best out of it.