> Been following this a little.  Mimics a fern very well, only that the gray
> color for older leaves could use a brown-gold coppery color I believe.

You're right. I'm still not satisfied with the texture. For new and "adult"
leaves it's quite well. For the old ones it doesn't fit yet. I'm still
working on that. (please note that the algorithm which assembles the whole
"wing" is still quite experimental. The sizes aren't ok yet and the old
leaves aren't full integrated in it)

> As for the close-up, unless used for rendering insect life or other such
> small scale scenes that fern leaf would be great for general vegetation as

I think I will reuse the small, single leaf (not the whole wing) as a leaf
of grass. Just changing the proportions (make it taller and longer) would
result in a perfect grass, wouldn't it?

> seen from a distance.  Is it computationally intensive and slow or
> something?  Or would a full fern plant, and many of them, be easily (read
> that as quickly) rendered?

That is hard to tell for me since my computer is a very old P200 (note: not
a PII or PIII, just the very basic Pentium even without any MMX or so...)
So ANY render takes a while on my PC ;-)

Basically:
A single leaf is rendered quickly. It's an automatically computed mesh with
an adaptive number of smooth_triangles. The triangles are fully computed and
differ from leaf to leaf. The main part of rendering time is parsing.
Tracing itself is rather quickly.
The picture I posted (the full wing) was rendered at 640x480 AA0.3 and it
took approx 5minutes on my old P200.

Some data:
a single leaf holds 20-120 smooth triangles (2 times 10-60, left and right
half) depending on the degree of "wrinkles". The fern I posted holds 2 times
30 leaves which makes approx. 60 meshes with about 600 smooth_triangles. To
build a realistic, complete fern it may take up to 10 or even 20 wings.

regards,

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