I created this project as a way to push the limits of Redshift's instancing to create a natural scene. All of the materials were created using a combination of procedural networks and custom OSL code, which allowed me to vary the color of each blade of grass and flower while still being able to handle the over 750,000,000 (instanced) polygons in the scene.
Each blade of grass or flower is its own instance, with there being around 9 million instances in the main field setup.
Here's the primary nodegraph for the instances. Multiple versions of each plant are generated with differing heights. A noise defines which height variant gets chosen. Flowers are done slightly differently, with some extra logic to prevent clumping while maintaining the target density.
At the scale of this scene, actually simulating the physics of these plants colliding and moving in the wind would require a pretty crazy amount of processing power. Instead, I use a lower-res Vellum hair sim to define the motion, transferring it's extrapolated motion back to each point instance in the scene. This also lets me extrapolate per-instance angular motion blur.
