www.kraytracing.com

Here's a quick model I made for a backdrop for some japanese medieval characters which will be animated in 3dsmax. Going to convert it to 3dsmax after finishing up in lw.
Sorry about low setting and low res. My laptop so slow and main focus is the building mesh.

P.S. we really need displacement in lw. I'm not satisfied with the grass in lw. Instancing has its limits.

I would be curious to see instance grass in your image and time. Seems like a small enough area there to try it out.

The grass looks fake, if you dont animate, just Photoshop it!
Or you can use crazy bump, a freee softawre that helps you making Normal Mapping with a regular picture. pretty amazing!!!

vpii - I rendered it with intance for testing and its ridiculous render time because of the AA pass. There must be a way to control it individually per object or surface. Anyway here it is. I set everything to low for testing just to see what the AA would do .

khan973 - There's normal mapping but the AA killed it .
I animate sometimes so I try not to photoshop stuff.

wow, huge render time. Looks better but not worth the extra effort and time. Maybe some type 2nd render pass with kray render to frontend onto same scene/model using standard lightwave and SAS for grass?

vpii wrote:wow, huge render time. Looks better but not worth the extra effort and time. Maybe some type 2nd render pass with kray render to frontend onto same scene/model using standard lightwave and SAS for grass?

yes huge render time! and for me it doesn't look good at all. looks like spikey little mountains. That's 1000 instances. I go over 1500 and kray won't render anymore.
Maybe kray veterans can help. I'm only using kray for around a month. But imho kray needs microdisplacement like vray to get good results. There's some grass solution in 9.5ob forum but still not as good as vray displacements. You can animate in vray even with displacements no problem with render time.

here's same scene rendered in final gather interpolated with low setting also. render time 17min. I have to tweak lighting and materials again to get the same look as kray maybe next time when I have free time.

Ok this rendered in .................18hrs. almost maxwell like render....time




clipmapped grass instance not the way to go. Takes too long to anti alias. I set the surface to uncached make it faster and precomputed raytraced and also lowered fg on surfece but still AA is killing render time.

Did some revisiting for fun. Using johny's tips. Big difference in render time.
Grass is all poly, kray seems to slow down with clipmapped objects. FG set to 10/0. Also took out area lights. Seems to slow down rendertime a lot.
So what's a good fill light to use in kray?

higher setting, 1h20 min on quadcore. Again this was previously several hours if I didn't use fg10/0. Really Big difference rendertime!

another test. short grass

I thing You have :
1/too big leafs
2/too strange colours
3/too high grass
sent You texture.