I assure you, each and every grassblade is unique, with translucency, changeable colours, editable seed, density, scales, etc's.
These shots are from just under a 2 metres high POV(about eye level). It's really not heavy on the renderer, far less intensive on memory aswell than a population on a global scale, and not a single object needs instancing, this is just a surface shader.
It isn't as pretty, of course, as some of the beautiful grass models that the modellers here are producing but for me this is a kind of milestone. My old Grass shader is really ugly when you get too close up, looks nice from further above or in the distance. This new one holds up well to a scale of millimetres, is far less uniform in displacement terms(not just upwards, I mean) and is a lot less complicated.
Now to try it out on distance shots to see if it works there, too...
More as it happens, I'm still working on this one...
