here you have a good example
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... 2&start=30 there is plenty more, but from him I got the tip for the texture. Here is the thing, you make a plane with the size of a patch of grass with the same proportion as the image you're going to use, let's say 25x15cm, add the diffuse channel and the opacity one, scatter (repeat it randomly changing scale and rotation) it thru the base grass plane, till you fill densely enough the area, so if your original plane had 2 faces, and you scatter it like 10000 times you'll end up with 20000 faces, not too much for a whole lot of grass, add more in the spots near the camera and less the farther.
The other way is following this tutorial
http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/0 ... al-part-1/ part one and two, it's a more "poly hungry" approach, but gives better results, and once we get instances it's going to kick ass for sure. But if you do your original grass blades with really low polys, like 1 or 3 at most you can crunch quite a few in your scene.
Pathtracing is the more realistic approach, it's the unbiased one btw, and it usually looks much much better, but it also takes more time, directlighing is biased, it looks good, but there is no real light distribution, so it usually looks more bland, yet it gives good images with no time. Also, sunlight looks good, but it has some limitations right now, specially with glass materials, use an HDRI to get very nice results and more interesting light effects, althou I do love neat and crispy shadows that only sunlight can give.
Also search the wip and gallery for grass, you'll see both approaches and different results.
Cheers
), rest done with Blender.
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