Where to find the best grass

[samschad]

I'm hoping that the post title catches eyes, and doesn't get me in trouble in any way....

I am having a hell of a time doing a render from Blender 2.5. I've got a very large grass scene to do in blender, with a building smack dab in the middle. Imagine an office building in the middle of a huge field.

Each time I try to create the scene, I wind up with a model somewhere around 3 million faces. My system handles it just fine, but Octane seems to crash. I've tried doing a particle system and then converting it. I've created basic meshes and duplicated them over and over. But they all seem to be too big.

Any ideas? I need to be able to render an image (for a 10' x 30' highway billboard) and an animation after all is said and done, about 30 seconds long. Can anyone suggest some alternatives?

Many thanks!
Sam

[ROUBAL]

Have you tried to make grass using alpha maps on small billboards ?

It works fine, except some shadows trouble in some lighting angles, because Octane still not support transparent shadows :

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... f=9&t=4184