I finally finished my current nature project. Due to the heavy memory usage (primary from the vegetation) I’ve experienced many crashes of Blender.
I’ve started experimenting using Geometry Nodes in 2.92 to layout the ground vegetation, but that was highly unstable at a certain amount of instances, so I switched to particles (using 2.83) and ended up buying Graswald. As I’ve already created some ground plants at that point, I’ve added them to Graswald and used those primary in this scene.
Tree’s and the large rocks are bought, the remaining parts are modelled by myself.
Very good, the level of detail is exceptional. Unfortunately when a scene gets to this point the only real way to not start reducing stuff is by having a better GPU, which is easier said than done. For rendering you could try separating the scene into layers by their depth, usually two or three is all you need. If you use the holdout you can recompile them in the compositor.
@robproctor83 I have to look into this, never used it before. But to my understanding, for correct shadows, the whole geometry (and textures for GI?) must be on the GPU, even if only a part of the image gets rendered. Is this wrong?