Grass - using presets - and getting proper display by driveways/sidewalks

[BKE]

The new presets for grass are very helpful. I would often wrestle for a long time to get proper grass coverage without maxing out my display/poly counts and getting errors.

Now, the presets work great, and your video for handling edges with 2 sizes of grass clumps is very helpful. My scenes are not divided by polylines like the tutorial shows. My workaround is to use the settings that do not allow the grass presets to touch the driveway/sidewalks, of course this leaves undesirable gaps along those edges. My plan is to come back and 'paint' smaller clumps of grass at the edges of my driveway/sidewalks. However, it is not coming together very well. There is overlap, etc.

Are there any suggestions to best accomplish what your latest tutorial shows in a non polylines based scene?

Should I try to use the preset 'large area' for the main yard, then preset 'detail' by the edges?

Am I correct in assuming that the presets are different than HG Grass? I was trying to mix the two types and I was getting bad results.

Thanks for your great product and nice tutorials!

[iToo]

Unfortunately the tutorial requires the falloff features, that are available only in splines/objects areas.

You would create a fake spline, taking the edges of the surface (Editable Poly->Edit Borders->Create shape from Selection). This is a manual process, but it works fine once you get the border.

Should I try to use the preset 'large area' for the main yard, then preset 'detail' by the edges?

Basically that's the idea of the tutorial, but using a custom model instead the presets.

Am I correct in assuming that the presets are different than HG Grass? I was trying to mix the two types and I was getting bad results.

Yes, the presets are created by iToo, and HQ Grass is a product of 3D Mentor. They are different libraries. Anyway, you can create your own presets based on HQ Grass if you like.