for most of my exterior renders, i have been using simple geometry to create grass rather than displacement. i prefer doing this because it allows the grass to be aligned in directions other than straight up, which is the only option with displacement.
generally, a blade of grass is 3 triangles, the scene contains ~500,000 blades, totalling ~1.5 mil triangles. maxwell has no problem rendering this.
however, as soon as i introduce some instanced trees into the scene, the render speed plummets. it is very odd, because i can render either the heavy geo grass or the instanced trees. both of those will render fine seperately, but when i try to render them both in the same scene, the maxwell benchmark plummets from ~20 for either scene by itself, to ~0.8 for the grass w/ trees.
i'm wondering if anyone has had any similar issues. the only way i've found to resolve this is to use displacement grass any time i want to use trees/plants in a scene.
attached are some images showing the renders seperately, and together. sorry for the red default mat on the trees w/ grass_geo image, but it just reiterates my point that even with a single material for the entire scene, maxwell can't render heavy geo grass w/ heavy geo trees. very confusing.
thanks.
