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To be fair Cinema is no slouch in this area either ! Not only can we scatter using cloner multi-instances, vertex maps and fields, but hair can be optimised to render pretty quick too. And if you are up in R25 you have dynamic scatter for placing other plants amongst the grass. I've seen some properly epic fields and pastures done this way... CBR

CG Forge has a free course: https://www.cgforge.com/course/houdini-for-the-new-artist Tim Van Helsidingen also has a free course (Howdini101). He also di the SideFX Snacks Volume 2 free course:

Anyone who knows I’m only interested in modelling real-world stuff to original scale. Normally I find the landscapes to be an issue. I have many grass textures and materials and they look good from a distance but not convincing closeup. I have used Hair and Forester in c4d and find them heavy on processing and render times. I have been looking at Grass Kit 5 by lesterbanks but not sure if it is any good for large areas. The only alternative is placing real grass, again heavy processing. Anyway, is anyone using Real Grass 5 and what is your experience or are there anyway I can pull this off with less impact on processing? The grass does not have to be animated but look good in closeups. What do you masters of landscapes do and use? Does it make a difference if I scale down my model then apply grass? Any feedback would be very much appreciated. Jacobite

https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/houdini-isnt-scary/

Honestly, for all the great content that Entagma put out, I would not consider them to be good instructors for beginners. They have been steadily attempting to simplify their content to appeal to larger audiences, but they still use legacy workflows that are unnecessarily complicated. In particular, this video is an unstructured, on-the-fly recording, and as such has many inefficiencies. I have watched that video in its entirety and there were several moments that could have been tackled in better ways, so be warned before investing the 90+ minutes that that video demands.

I myself have recently jumped from Octane to RS so this is all a bit new to me too, and the information in the manuals, both on maxon.net and the original RS docs doesn't specifically mention this problem. But I am going to read between the lines and speculate that the RS sky system just doesn't work like the Physical Sky we have in Standard / Physical Renderers in that we can't just specify a color for the sun. The sky setup in RS seems focused mainly on recreating accurate sky models, and so the only influence we seem to have over sun colour is in the Sky Object itself, where we can send it redder or bluer, with 0 being physically accurate. But I disagree we can't see reflections in glass objects. Here is the sun reflecting in a glass sphere ! Apologies for graininess - we are having a heatwave over here, and don't want to melt my computer by rendering for too long in the day ! CBR

Use filter op. Here is the simplest case where there is no falloff involved

There's another frame rate (FPS) parameter in your project settings (Attribute Manager -> Menu Mode -> Project -> Tab Project). Both need to match, to get the number of frames you expect.

OK, my strategy for mirrorballing that shape would be to make a grid array of plane objects that you align to the first flat face on your object, then make it editable, connect the pieces into a single mesh, and do a couple of knife cuts along the edges, deleting the polys that remain outside those. If you use the workplane alignment functions you can actually create the plane and cloner pre-aligned to the face in question, which is helpful. Then you can extrude them by a set amount and add a bevel deformer on the parent group. Then you can mirror, symmetry or otherwise transform that plane so you get the other side for free. And then it's just rinse and repeat for every remaining side. I would expect to be able to get that done in about half an hour. This 1 face took about 5 minutes... You can add various effectors before you make the cloner editable if you want a bit more real world randomness in there for example, which will be important for the sparkles, as for the most effectiveness of those you will want every one of the pieces angled subtly differently from its neighbours - if you leave them all exactly planar (as I have done above for illustrative purposes) that very much reduces the effectiveness of the mirror ball look, which is why you mostly see that on spheres.... CBR

In scenes with a couple hundred deformers, which by nature are very computationally slow, disengaging them frees up navigation and also allows the user to see at a glance the total contribution of deformers in a scene. Same goes for the Generator, Animation and Expression on-off switches. The Generator switch in particular is essential for saving frozen scenes and much more effective than the escape key.

Yep, that was it - realised it almost immediately after I posted but then had skype call. That's under the Modes / Execution menu in 26. I hate those buttons - they reliably catch me out every few years 🙂 CBR

Of course. Browse youtube for my old videos and see if I can spot what I need in one of them. Im not even joking.

My preferred method is "oh, I think I remember making that material 3 years ago, let me go check an old file and steal it from there"