Pictures of grass.  They'll be my downfall...

A while back I posted an image of a stupid robot happily running around a
grass knoll.  That picture took, like, FOREVER to render.  And I mean almost
two days (if memory serves me right).

Then I discovered mesh2.  Yow!

I modelled some blades of grass in hamaPatch (see the pic), exported to
Wavefront OBJ format (sub-division 3, kids), converted them to
mesh2 with 3DWin and then set them lose over a heightfield using trace().

The resulting image uses 125,000 copies of the grass mesh2 object (and 1000
mesh2 flower objects for a bit of colour) and took about 10 minutes to
render (AA0.3, 800x340, GUI and Render priority normal).

The only problem with this pic is the flowers.  (They're not meant for close
scrutiny!)  Fog in 3.5 beta 10 (windows) does not seem to like targa
image_maps with alpha channels.  If I take out of the fog, the problem
disappears.  I don't think its a max_trace_level problem or similar - any
ideas?  Genuine bug?

Bye,
Alan.

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Preview of image '35grass-v4_07.jpg'

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