Yes, according to that site it was 3ds max + vray combo (the plugin is only a scatter/random shader assign plugin).
I tried to test Maya + mental ray with 5 billion polys but this is all I get:
// Error: Fatal (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya. //
BSP2, Raytracing and standard Sun + Sky setup…RAM usage at 20%
:wip:
A couple usefull techniques for me while working with huge amounts of proxy instances:
-navigation with proxys hidden under layers
-if I want to move a billion triangles fast in the viewport I hide the layers they are on and select them in the outliner… Pressing w of course, reveals your moving widget.
-previously I used 2 polys for one proxy, now I triangulate one poly, and delete the one half, leaving just one triangle for every proxymesh. This helped tremendously.
-scScatter script does not like my huge terrain, my tringles, or maya2010 with 1000 instances. My system choked for over a half hour lol
I did new render tests. The results are fantastic, posting soon.
10,734,500 tris
935mb maya.exe idle
500 proxys
RenderView:
Maya.exe 970mb
Time 35 secs
Batch:
Mayabatch.exe 226mb
Time 1min23sec
214,690,000 tris
861mb maya.exe idle
10000 proxys
RenderView:
Maya.exe 911mb
Time 46secs
Batch:
Mayabatch.exe 336mb
Time 1min55sec
1,073,450,000 tris
1.12g maya.exe idle
50000 proxys
RenderView:
Maya.exe 1.395gig
Time 3min 29 secs
Batch:
Mayabatch.exe 752mb
Time 10min 30 sec
3,220,350,000 tris
1.83gig maya.exe idle
150,000 proxys
RenderView:
Maya.exe 2.55gig
Time 16min24sec
Batch:
Mayabatch.exe still waiting*
Time still waiting*
Note: @ 26min45sec mayabatch.exe started, so mayabatch.exe rendered for*
Also, I am getting 100% CPU usage with RenderView rendering while MR batch only uses 25% of CPU… Any ideas on how to utilize more processing power?
My next test is doubling the last weighing out at 6,440,700,00
Maya.exe is idling at 2.9 gigs
but I’m still waiting for mr batch to finish on the last test.
you must to especify the number of render threads, 4 or 8 i supose.
or if you render in command line use the -rt flag
render -r mr -v 5 -rt 8 filename.mb
@tostao_wayne: First off, your work has been extremely helpful. So thanks much for that! Secondly, I have a quick question about your leaf shader you posted a while back. Just wanted to see if you had changed your methodology at all since then. Are you still using any maps in the cutout opacity of the mia_material_x to get the transparency?
When using the mia_material_x plugged into the two sided shader with a map in cutout opacity I’m getting crashes everytime. This may be because in both my top and bottom shader I have a cut out opacity map applied. Is that a bad idea? If that is, in fact, a bad idea, how else would you go about getting both the top and bottom shader to have the correct opacity for the edges of the leave shapes?
Thanks much! 
tnakx Redsand1080,
no i haven’t change my metodology, i use two diferent mia_material_x plugged into a two sided shader, both of them with the cutout opacity mapped, the only thing is that you can’t plug this two sided shader into the shadow shader slot of the shading group, you must to plug only one of the mia materials into the shadow shader slot (i ussually use the front shader).
what version of maya are you ussing??
if you need i can send you a shader example
Thank You. I found I am only running at 25% during translation. I do get 100% otherwise.
But the translation is the longest step with these large scenes.
Is it possible to get this Translation stage to use more CPU?
That last test finished:
3,220,350,000 tris
1.83gig maya.exe idle
150,000 proxys
RenderView:
Maya.exe 2.55gig
Time 16min24sec
Batch:
Mayabatch.exe 1.75 gig
Time 1hr 44min 30 sec
Note: @ 26min45sec mayabatch.exe started
So I started a new test,
12,881,400,000 Yes almost 13Billion Triangles.:surprised
600,000 Proxys containing, 21,469 Triangles Each.
Maya.exe Idle Speed 4.6 gigs
RenderView Window Render:
Maya.exe Peak Ram= 5.28gig
Time= 2hours55minutes35sec
Batch Render:
Batch.exe Peak Ram Usage: (Un-tested estimated 2.2 gigs)
Time: (untested but will under estimate min 9 hours)
Why is renderview so fast compared to batch? where is the hickup?
So the triangle instead of quads does seem to help. Based on the way these numbers are going, I still think I would need a tone of ram and time for 500 billion… I mean I can have a seen with 500 billion, thats fine, I just could not render them all at once. Or save with them all visible.
I think thats all I will ever need(hate saying that). So I will stop here.I did make really boring screen shots again… I am attempting something a little more artistic with them all now. Sorta wish I planned something better in the first place.
Anyway good luck, hope this helps. It will help me for future planning of forests etc
Rasa.
@rasamaya: as “batch” do you mean batch render from maya or render from commandline outside of maya? Sorry if it was stated before.
If you didn´t tested from commandline can you do it also? I find render times between render view and commandline mosty comparable, so I´m curious.
Hey igi, batch from in maya. I will test with batch from the command line too 
I had know idea you could get different results.
I’m having a rough time with these palm trees. They appear to work fine at first, and then as I keep working some weird artifacts emerge which are just killing me. I’m almost ready to rework my trees entirely somehow…
At first one would think that it’s bad alpha channels in the cutout opacity, but these are Onyx palms, and the leaves are all modeled, not textured. The shader is a simple mia_x just like the other ones we’ve used in this thread, only no file textures, just color nodes.
You can see it most on the far right, midway up. Any reason why reflections would cause such an effect? I’m stumped here. Ray depth is at 6, 6, 12 throughout, and even with higher settings it looked identical.
i would say it’s a translucency problem, at least it seems more a refraction problem then reflection.
Are the palm trees “visible in refractions”?
They are visible in reflections/refractions… First thing I do anymore, when importing .obj’s!
Might have to just break the shader down and use process of elimination, but so far turning off reflections (in the mia_x) and refractions and translucency hasn’t changed anything.
A screenshot of the geometry in the Viewport:
i’m sure i already had that problem, but can’t realy remember what is the solution, sorry.
InfernalDarkness, the “skip reflection on inside” of the mia_X must to be deactivated
more tricks, the objects that you import has vertice normals, and not face normals,
first of all, set normal to face, and smooth them, or use a bump map to force the render to use a per pixel normal.
I was wondering if anyone ever figured out to get maya paint fx leaves to aim in correct direction similar to alessandro prodan. I know this was discussed in detail much earlier in this thread and I read all of those posts. At that point in time it seemed like the general concensus was that getting maya paint fx leaves to be anywhere close to ‘sky sensitive’ was not possible…short of some miracle. I’m aware of that trick Duncan used which was disscussed earlier as well. I tried it and sure enough, like a few of you said, some of the leaves are right-side-up and some are upside-down.
The thing that stumps me is obviously alessandro got it to work. So…how? Did he write some script that would analyze which direction the normals of the leaves were pointing and make sure those were pointing in the positive Y axis? Or did he write some other complex script that did something totally different but the end result is that the leaves are oriented correctly? Or…would he have seperated the mesh and modified them by hand?
It would cool to know. So I was just wondering if anyone had figured it out since those posts some months ago.
he simply uses a single sided shader, it doesn’t matter if the leaf looks up or down
InfernalDarkness, the “skip reflection on inside” of the mia_X must to be deactivated
more tricks, the objects that you import has vertice normals, and not face normals,
first of all, set normal to face, and smooth them, or use a bump map to force the render to use a per pixel normal.
Nailed it dead-on, of course! I don’t think I could have gotten help faster had I emailed you directly!
Worked like a charm, but now the reflectivity is too low. Should be some quick fixes from here on out; I likely turned it down in an attempt to fix that issue, previously. Thanks again for your help, my friend!
he simply uses a single sided shader, it doesn’t matter if the leaf looks up or down
I guess sometimes the simplest solution is the right one.