Hi,
Here is the first image of a new serie, I'll update this thread with the new images, many to come I think as this scene is quite complex, and in varius lighting and seasons ...
I saw that house in the december Bati Deco magazine (Architect is Anthony Duffeleer) and I took some liberty with the model but it is very similar.
Except the very far trees made with an image on a plane, everything is 3D and home made, thanks Octane to provide such result with about 1.1 gb of memory.
Edit : Some answers to various questions
For the vegetation I try to avoid geometry and I make big use of planes and opacity maps for plants and leaves. For grass, this time I just used a high definition grass map and used subdivision and displacement for the foreground part and reduce the subdivision until the background grass with no subdiv and no displace, the result is not bad at all since I have those plants on foreground.
For trees, I'm still using some home made tools which help me to generate them, I usually make the leaf maps myself and groups several leaves in a single map to reduce the textures amount. To improve the result I should give them some translucency.
Rendering time was about 1h in 1800x1000
Lit with an hdr map
About 4.2 million polys
For this one I used a RGB spectrum on the transmission channel for leaves to get some translucency
Rendering time was about 3h in 1600x890
Lit with an hdr map
About 4.2 million polys
Here is an interior shot with several mesh lights
Rendering time was about 1h30 at 1400x850
An interior shot with several mesh lights
Rendering time was about 30min at 1600x1000
I added some more mesh lights, it increases the rendering time but not so much, about 2h for the two last images in 1600px wide. I used a spherical sky jpeg map, as it doesn't have any hdr channel, it doesn't illuminate the scene but it produces a diffuse light useful to give some tonality and some atmosphere to the scene. Using such a jpeg map produces few noises and reduces the rendering time.