The next render:
Hi. I’ve also been trying to do make nice grass with strand renders. I’m still struggling with it! One thing I did notice is that I had to use a much lighter and yellowish green colour than I started out with ( 4EB316 at the center. C6F96C towards the tip). I’ve gone for slightly longer and straighter grass in clumps (particle children about 60). I found the more random or Brownian I tried to add… it didn’t look so good. Looking at your grass - I wonder whether it needs to curve more at the base and less at the tips?
Material and Grass Clump Models:
https://sites.google.com/site/ts2shotgun//rsrc/1408342358092/home/Material%20for%20Grass.png
https://sites.google.com/site/ts2shotgun//rsrc/1408342367698/home/Grass%20Models.png
I did mention I was still struggling to get my grass working right?
Here’s your models, plus a (very) rough drawing (in bright green) of the shape I thought might work better: more curvature at the bottom and less at the top of the clumps. Perhaps larger clumps too (more blades)?
But on second thoughts, I did a closeup of your grass and think maybe the clump and leaf shapes are actually OK? I think you could reduce the variation in colour and go for a lighter green. I’ve included a shot of my grass for comparison showing how much lighter I made it. Of course mine is using BI strand render. You can see the colour ramp I use for colour variation along the length of the grass. But the strand render doesn’t seem to allow colour variation across the blades - and wider blades didn’t look good. with strand render so I went for very long narrow blades.
In the closeup of your grass I’ve circled one leaf for example - the blades still look thick like tubes rather than flat blade- but I assume from your earlier comment that they are really just 2D (ribbon) meshes? I’m wondering if you should remove the random colour variations from the blades (blotchiness?). Make them entirely based on a UV mapped leaf texture (grained like the one you posted earlier). Also, each clump is usually a single plant - so I’d consider using a single colour/texture on all the leaves of a clump, and probably only 3 different colours/textures in all.
MUCH clearer. I try not to base it entirely on a texture, in fear of it looking fake. The tube effect is coming from the translucency (I believe). I think that I will experiment with that translucency later to see if I can get the texture/thickness of grass to show properly.
The texture is ugly. The grass texture doesn’t align properly The texture gets stretched (inversely).
It doesn’t appear perfect like this when I apply the texture.
i would suggest making a few thinner strands, and also if you’re not already using sss then add that and it’ll help get rid of the plastic look
Also, no one noticed that you want to plug the texture into the diffuse also.
I will take all this into account, thanks!
Next render (this seems like a step back from previous renders):
It is grainy because it was rendering on CPU and just wanted to get some progress on here.
I tried noise removal but it blurred it so there you go.
I’m doing a few more changes and hopefully uploading a new (less grainy) version by the end of this week.
I can’t render it anymore, it renders on CPU and now my computer crashes when I try to render -.-
Any tips?
lol
Means your out of memory (RAM). Every time you render, each of those blades of grass has to be accounted for and compiled, in sorts. This takes memory. Try decreasing the amount of polygons in the scene, decreasing tile size (if on GPU), or enabling “Instances” in the render settings. Sorry not much to tell you other than that… Or the same old same old ‘buy some RAM’. lol Good luck man; it was looking pretty good there at the last.
Thanks for the suggestions, I can’t lower the poly count - and hopefully I’ll get more RAM soon (I’m running on 8GB). I will try instancing though!
Oh my god guys. I feel like an idiot 
I lied - in a way, I just DID reduce the poly count after I said that.
I had the grass waayyy to dense (MUCH denser than it needed) and now I reduced it renders much faster, less noisy, and doesn’t crash 
(Weight painted plane so grass would appear only in camera area, and reduced children from 10 to 3)
So far there is no visible difference other than the performance increase and the grass orientation is different, making it (unfortunately) harder to compare to the other renders.
Seeing as how this is sooo much better, expect an update soon!
Next render:
It really depends on what grass type you are aiming for. I have grass around my area that looks like that.
Now I understand. The grass is thin in my area. If you want to reduce render noise, check this out: http://blenderartists.org/forum/private.php?do=showpm&pmid=545156
I am unable to view it. Can you copy/paste what it said?