JWEST

Remove any smoothing groups that the glass might have.

More people of colour please, the African market would buy these up in a second since its the main request for the type of people in all of our visuals.

I'm leaning towards the pretty penny cost for the perpetual license suite As far as I know they phased this out on 31 Jan 2016 so you will have to rent. I also use vray 1.5 as well, which would be upgraded too; Vray 3.4 will be waaay faster than 1.5, it will take some adjustment. Have you tried the demo yet? Mental Ray does come with Max 2017 but it is a separate installation now.

Have you seen this yet? https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php/topic,6375.msg51713.html#msg51713

I have both Vizpark's grass and trees and they are awesome, they come with Forest Pack Pro presets too which makes life easier.

I'm using Quickbooks at the moment.

I have swapped over to Corona from Vray and I must say I'm really happy. Granted that there are features that Vray has that Corona doesn't but these will get there. Price wise it wins hands down, especially if you are a small studio in a country where your currency sucks against the Dollar and Euro. I must say that its ease of use and user friendliness is great too. I doubt it will be a vray killer anytime soon but I'm excited to see how it develops.

Here ya go, there is a sale on too http://cgaxis.com/product-category/furnishing/store/

You could just group the layer into a smart object then rasterize that layer. or just leave it as a smart object in case you need to edit the later on...