Here are some shots of my grass macro working, see my posts in general 
and scene-files.

I'm trying to make this thing run faster, as it needs to cover several 
square miles for a scene I'm working on.

...Chambers

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Ben Chambers wrote:
> Here are some shots of my grass macro working, see my posts in general 
> and scene-files.
> 
> I'm trying to make this thing run faster, as it needs to cover several 
> square miles for a scene I'm working on.

This will sure take some time and memory to process!  How many 
super-computers do have available for this scene? ;)

An other alternative, if I may suggest, is to put your 3D grass at the 
front, but farther, it's no longer necessary (specially if you decide to 
use focal-blur), so in the far you can use a simple texture of your grass.

I also remember, several years ago, a macro of function or something had 
been made to render the most realistic grass I had ever seen on povray, 
and it was very much optimised as it was (i think) one of the fastest 
methods...  lemme search...

Simon

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> I also remember, several years ago, a macro of function or something had 
> been made to render the most realistic grass I had ever seen on povray, 
> and it was very much optimised as it was (i think) one of the fastest 
> methods...  lemme search...

Here, check this out:
http://runevision.com/show.asp?id=100

Personally, I don't quite like the shape of the grass (looks too 
cartoonish), so it might an interesting challenge to make a more 
realistic 3D grass and use that for the texture.  Again, both the 3D 
version and texture version could be combined for additional realism.

HTH,
   Simon

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> I'm trying to make this thing run faster, as it needs to cover several 
> square miles for a scene I'm working on.

Faster parse-time or render-time? (Or both?!)

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Orchid XP v3 wrote:
>> I'm trying to make this thing run faster, as it needs to cover several 
>> square miles for a scene I'm working on.
> 
> Faster parse-time or render-time? (Or both?!)

Parse time is only a minute or so, render time is the killer.

And Simon, I don't use any supercomputers, just my venerable Athlon XP 
1700+ (1.4gHz) :)

It's currently covering about 2M square feet, which actually comes out 
to 1/12 of a square mile.  It traces in 12 minutes at 640x480, no AA, 
and uses 140MB of RAM.

However, since it instantiates a mesh to cover that territory, adding 
more area shouldn't use too much memory.  It's just the trace time that 
will suffer, and which I was hoping to cut down on.

...Chambers

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