In my personal experience it’s often the case that a bush or tree is simply not dense enough. A tree trough which you can easily see is sometimes just inappropriate. To the right is an example.

This How-To shows a simple trick to give single objects a much denser structure.

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Asked about render times of the transparency samples, Matt answered with this:

Render times were about 3 hours (on one core) for each of the latest two renders, on computers which render Karsten’s TG2 benchmark in about 5 or 6 minutes.
(source: Matt at the Planetside-forum)

This gave me the idea to use Karsten’s benchmark table to define a new measure for render times that allows for fast comparison of the time it takes to render a specific scene – even if you don’t know the speed of the machine it was rendered on. more…

A substantial problem with populations is their resource requirement. Having several populations in a scene often requires hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of memory.

Before Vista was released in 2007, the typical PC had been equipped with relatively little memory. But you don’t get very far with 512MB. Furthermore, the population process can take quite some time.
So, what do populations have to be like if you want them to be generated fast and economically? more…