Hi. Following is some info on the grass shader I am currently developing for the plugin. It works by creating an Alembic (ABC) file containing hair strands which render in Octane a grass blades. The generation of the ABC file is similar to the generation of CSV files - however it is done instead of loading an OBJ file (ie. so instead of loading an OBJ as a proxy, you load an ABC file - and the plugin will generate the ABC for you).
This is designed only for grass blades - it is not a generic hair strand generator. Each grass blade has 4 vertices (root, tip and 2 in between), and the Randomness effects the height variance and bend in the blade. You need to refresh the Octane scene once an ABC file has been generated in order for it to be loaded into the scene.
Because ABC files have a different material connection point to OBJ files inside Octane, there are some constraints with the grass material. There is no "default" grass material - so you need to Import your material each time you regenerate the ABC file. You cannot Material Pick a grass shader material - instead, select the proxy host and the grass material will appear in the Materials tab.
The render below was 500,000 blades of grass (hair strands). Even at this volume, there is quite a load on the graphics card. Over 1 million strands you will need a powerful graphics card. The plugin will generate up to 10 million strands - however I am not sure if this number of strands would actually render.
Paul
