Not nearly a fraction as nice as Metro’s Grazing sheep but functional - figured I’d post the scene in case anyone wants to play around with it or test their render times. It’s made from built-in procedurals (Cellular and Mix) and uses Vray Displacement.
Max 7 scene file is here:
http://www.lunarstudio.com/misc/grass\_test.zip (27KB)
Athlon XP 64-bit 3200
2 gigs DDR400 (PC3200)
oooh cheers…is it fairly fast?
arrrgh max 7, bugger, could you post the mat and a pic of the settings please mate?
I’m actually running it in a scene (with a decent amount of lawn) to be posted - it looks good and is relatively fast for me.
Here’s some screen captures of the settings:
The first Mix map is in the diffuse of a Vraymtl. You’ll have to tweak the colors accordingly to your lighting setup. Adjusting the grass height - 3-4" gives it some realism. Also increasing a plane’s subdivisions helps. And you’ll also want to increase the tiling of the cellular displacement depending on how much grass needs to fill the scene. I found the max I needed was 75x75.
it always bugged me how displaced grass always sticks up like little sticks. Too bad vray cant have displacement direction like mr..
ive found if you use a subtle max displacement using noise or something else on the plane it breaks it up some which can go along way towards getting away from that perfect vertical grass look.
cheers jujubee…I’ll have a play with that later on
here is how i think grass should look.
Wow. That’s really impressive How the heck did you manage that and what were the render times like?!?!!?!!?
juju, its max hair which comes with 7.5 converted to mesh, 35000 hairs…r-time is 13 min with quasi for both bounce
Ornatrix does a damn fine grass as well 
i d say any hair system will do nicer grass then displ..infact you can use pflow and modeled grass to spread particles across surface and get as nice grass as this ones
They all look great - but you are all talking about really turning up render times. For scenes with alot of geometry and no closeups- a simple vray displacement should work better. right?
for arch vis I think it works just fine. Of course for broadcast or film, simple displacement doesn’t really have enough control. I mainly do arch vis at the moment, so its good enough for me.
From my tests, its just as long because the geometry is still being created
I wouldn’t think it’s creating nearly as many polys. What would you all think is the best method for archvis then?
let me pull up my calculator here…
lets see…for this grass set that i had, there is 35000 individual hairs totalling to 2100000…which is 21 million poly.
Now if you take a plane and subdivide it 256 times…anyways it will me trilions of polys.
I think you mean 2.1 Million polys.
Also i would get your calculator checked out
Uh… Vray Fur? Hello? Vray Forums?
Has gravity and number of knots.
Can achieve the same as those hair ones.
And I think it is fast - but haven’t used max7+ hair.
vray fur is great too. though it has far less control then the hair packages. I suppose if your going the geometry route like that, Id go for the approach that gave me the most control.
here is another approach. Particle emitted grass onto a plane
7 min per frame with quasi for both bounce