Quote -
And if the actor is sitting in the grass, his/her feet can be imperfectly positioned, since they would actually be IN the grass. The trick is getting something to satisfyingly muffle the contact points so it looks natural. My biggest complaint with 3d pictures is the perfection....all lines are smooth and even on terrains, there is no real matter extending from them.

Not necessarily; you can hammer in a lot of roughness if you work on it (esp. objects at a distance). Even in Vue... folks simply don't use what's there (for instance, in the terrain editor you can simulate trees by pebbling the mid-distance terrain, then applying a decent texture to it).

My big thing is how the figure contacts the ground. Not all of 'em stand up, and setting a figure pose to contact the not-so-flat ground requires a bit of tweaking. Simply doing all that in Poser first is a bit of a pain (requires the mini-terrain "ground" bit to be exported out of Vue, then into Poser, then drag both it and figure back in, etc.).

Since (in Vue or Carrara) there's a way to simply adjust the figure on-the-fly in the rendering app, it saves a lot of steps in the workflow, y'know?

Quote - Carrera's hair as grass, though....that has a lot of potential once they get the poser issues worked out.

Anything Grows (a Cararra plugin) has been able to do this for ages now. ;)

/P