dhavalmistry - Thank you for the tip and that link, it's going to keep me busy for a while.
The tents have a specific arrangement based on tribes, one option as you said is place one by one, but somehow i have to think of something else, since there are too many tents.
Mohawk20 - that's the way i prefer, render everything in TG2. I am not a render/shader guy so doing it solely in Maya is out of the question. TG2 gives a really nice realistic feel to it, i think it is an amazing software.
I attached an image of what the idea is, that was done in Maya by another artist a while ago and now they want it animated and a bigger render version of it. The tents the way it was done was using displacement maps on the terrain, i wonder if something similar can be done in TG2
thanks guys