Creating Grass

This week has been dedicated to working out my pipeline for creating the complex environments for my film.  It takes place in a fantasy forest clearing with involves lots of plants, which in turn involves lots and lots of polygons.  Millions of polygons -- dare I say, Billions of polygons!!!

Muah-ha-ha

This process involves using a particle emitter to generate particles on my ground plane and then using a geometry instancer to replace each particle with a grass clump allowing the scene to render with a relatively small RAM foot print.

A similar process is used on the trees which are Mental Ray proxies to allow me to render a whole forest with little to no extra impact on my working scene.

This process involves some clever coding, of which I can take no credit for.  I simply found the right pieces of expressions I needed and copied them into my workflow.

After a long two days of this I'm coming to the realization that it may not be feasible to use this approach for the entire film and get it rendered in time.  I'm going to do a test on a radically different non-photoreal approach as a quick alternative.  I'll report back soon with my findings.