Here is a test render of a scene i have been working on the last days. 
It is a bit of a test case for how efficiently you can use massive 
instancing for reoccurring objects like trees instead of multiple 
versions with different levels of detail.  The result is quite 
encouraging, the scene contains:

  258000 grass patches each 6000 triangles
   24700 trees each 501000 triangles

   -> in total more than 13 billion triangles

The rest (terrain and house) is made with isosurfaces - total memory use 
about 700 Mb.  And it only takes about 6 hours to render (with 
ridiculously low radiosity settings, no area_light and quite bad aa though).

The clouds are made with makeclouds, the sky with lightsys/skylight and 
the trees with povtree.

Some observations i have made with the different tools:

- lightsys: the mesh created for the sky is not very good, i got 
multiple 'all determinants too small' messages.
- povtree seems to scale the leaves of the tree with the size of the 
branches, normally you'd expect all leaves to be about the same size. 
For the way how the leaves are used in a needle tree (which is of course 
not so suited for a closeup view) this is not so bad but otherwise it 
can look quite unrealistic.
- the makeclouds clouds do not look very good in a larger render but i 
would probably just have to create a higher resolution df3 for this purpose.

Christoph

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