770 million polys - Forrest Test

Most tutorials etc. recommend using alphaplanes for forests. But I don’t really get why - real geometry seems to work very nice.
This is 22k trees with 35k polys on each one, so it’s 770m polys and Cycles can handle it with ease thanks to instancing.
The shader for the Leaves is very easy, just a mix between diffuse and translucent with Specular and some Color Variationslapped onto it:


The only problem is, that denoising doesn’t really work in such complex scenes (it get’s washed out) and the glossy shader creates some fireflies - so atm I’m trying to fake the specular instead.
This isn’t supposed to look good at this stage, it’s just an early stress test.


Clay Render here

Rally nice test. One reason for alpha planes for forrest is maybe because of the high render time and memory usage. Many are still on a 4 gb GPU.

I’m on 4 GB too (gtx970) but this scene takes only 460 mb, because instancing is very efficient. A 1980x1080 render takes ca. 11 minutes for 120 samples which isn’t too bad I think - but still a bit noisy because of the darn glossy shader. But yeah alpha planes without transparent shadows are probably faster.

Can’t believe this scene only takes 460 mb to render, didn’t know instancing was that memory efficient