Grass, Grass, Grass

At this point the grass has come to a point where me and Mikey are both pretty happy with it and in terms of look we could tweak it slightly and it'd look great. There are some things in the back of my head though that keep bugging me.

1) I had a suggestion from my tutor to make it more stylised, I'm unsure of this but thought I might as well give it a whack.

2) I DEFINITELY want to do all I can to reduce render times, currently the scene takes 12-15 minutes with grass to render a single shot. This might not SEEM like much, but when you consider that render times without the grass is approximately 1-2 minutes, something can definitely be done.

At the moment Mikey has set up the scene to use Final Gather and Raytracing on full on each asset of the scene, we also have plenty of mia shaders in play. Now I have been doing some research and it occurs to me that we haven't tried any of the 'tricks' that are in use with the industry for fur.

STYLISE ATTEMPTS

RENDER TIME SAVING TECHNIQUES

I turned off Raytracing + Final Gather and switched to Rasterizer. However Physical Sun and Sky requires Raytracing + Final Gather, the Render time for this shot was 5 mins. But as you can see the lighting has failed.

I switched the Fur Render settings from Hair Primitive to Volume Shader, this is a quicker technique and saves time. Whilst Hair Primitive is more accurate, Volume Shader merely attempts to recreate the fur look. However Volume Shading fur does not work well with Sun and Sky as there are issues with Raytracing.

NURBS INSTEAD OF POLYS

Realising that Maya's Fur feature and it's density is linked to the Polygons or Divisions of a model, I felt that maybe I was going about this the wrong way. What I decided to do is to duplicate my Polygon geometry Hill and convert that into a Subdiv then into NURBS. NURBS is much quicker for Maya to utilise and Fur is also able to be used with NURBS better than with Polygons. I assigned my Grass System to the NURBS Hill and because of this it meant I could substantially lower down the density of my grass.

500,000 Density, the white area is the NURBS. 

My Render time has come down SUBSTANTIALLY.

500,000 Density, this time the NURBS Hill is in a Transparent Layer.

However the Hilltop renders with grass weren't very promising.

After some Gamma Correction using the Gamma Correction node, I was able to solve this.

Initial Gamma Correction.

After some tweaks to colour and Density. (Density at 2,000,000 for Hilltop)

This Hilltop Render only took 6 minutes!