Making the 'field'

To make the field I just used the sculpt geometry tool on a flat plane in Maya to create rolling hills. I then applied a stock image of grass to the plane and tiled the image so that when I applied the grass effect on top it wouldn't look strange with a flat colour underneath.

To create the grass look I used the Fur effect in Maya and changed the settings to create the right looking grass. To animate it I created a Hair system that the Fur system would follow when I attached it.

Here is the Tutorial I used to create this effect:


Here is what the grass looks like on a rendered still frame. For time reasons I was unable to render our the whole video showing the movement. Obviously lighting needed to be fixed but this is the image I got after finishing with the grass effects.