Implemetation - Creating Grass

I needed to create a realistic looking garden for my animation. The only way I could think of doing this was to create the strands of grass in 3D, as opposed to using a texture on a flat or even bumpy plane.

After a lot of searching, I found a tutorial that suggested creating four blades of grass and randomly duplicating them across a surface. Unfortunately, to make the grass look realistic, I found a needed a lot of it. I had to make a compromise here with quality vs. render times. I found 100,000 blades seemed to give the best result, especially where the grass was being viewed close up.