3Dgrass is a global vegetation enhancement plugin for X-Plane 12, designed to make the simulator’s world feel far richer and more physically present at ground level.
Instead of relying on flat painted terrain textures, 3Dgrass adds standing 3D vegetation objects around the camera across suitable scenery worldwide. Fields, airport surroundings, rural roadsides, remote landscapes and low-level environments gain visible depth, movement and natural variation that simply does not exist in default ground textures.
3Dgrass is designed to enhance visible ground detail around the aircraft and camera, rather than render dense vegetation continuously across the entire distant landscape.
Whether users are flying general aviation, operating helicopters, exploring bush strips, or creating cinematic screenshots, 3Dgrass transforms the world beneath them from a flat surface into a living, spatial environment.
Key features
Global dynamic 3D vegetation for X-Plane 12
Standing 3D vegetation objects, not painted ground texture overlays
Dense local vegetation coverage around the camera
Smooth camera-based streaming designed to avoid loading stalls
Wind-reactive animated grass and plants
130+ vegetation and plant types
Regionally appropriate biomes, including meadow, airport, tundra, wetland, desert, alpine, tropical, coastal and scrub vegetation
Detail flowers, scrub and plant clusters for natural variation
Airport-aware placement that avoids hard runways, taxiways, aprons and pavement polygons
Global road exclusion support to help prevent vegetation appearing across visible roads
Seasonal and biome-aware vegetation logic
Performance presets and detailed user controls
Built for visual transformation
3Dgrass is designed to create an immediately obvious before-and-after difference:
Before: flat terrain textures, empty-looking fields, visually lifeless grass surfaces and sparse ground detail.
After: standing vegetation, animated movement, dense ground cover around the camera and a far more believable world at low altitude and ground level.
Vegetation variety
The included vegetation library covers a wide range of environments, including:
Short airport grass
Tall meadow grass
Dry, wet, alpine and tundra grasses
Marsh, reed and wetland vegetation
Coastal and dune grasses
Tropical and savanna vegetation
Desert scrub and regional shrubs
Flowers, mosses, lichens and small detail plants
Examples include daisies, buttercups, poppies, bluebells, lavender, heather, lupins, foxglove, edelweiss, cotton grass, gorse, ferns, cattails, papyrus, sagebrush, tumbleweed, protea, aloe, New Zealand flax, bamboo grass, bromeliads, moss and lichen patches.
Flexible performance controls
3Dgrass includes configurable presets and detailed settings so users can balance visual density, coverage and performance. Controls include draw distance, density, spacing, fade behaviour, maximum instances, grass height scaling, slope tolerance, road and pavement margins, seasonal behaviour and advanced streaming controls.
Especially effective for
General aviation
Bush flying
Grass strips and rural airfields
Low-level flying
Airport surroundings
Screenshots and cinematic video
