I'm assuming this will go under the category of just needing to brute force the render, but I was hoping someone might be able to give any suggestions. I'm rendering a bunch of outdoor prairie type scenes with lots of tall grass, for which I'm using a system of poly cards with opacity cutout.
Since I have to set the transparency depth quite high (30-50) to avoid the back row of cards from starting to render with black opacity, it's destroying my render times (roughly 3x longer than rendering without opacity maps). Can anyone offer suggestions for optimizing this type of scene? Thanks!