Make a plane, go to the "Paint Effects" menu ("Rendering" group) and click on "Make Paintable". Open Visor, go to the "grasses" group and select a brush. Paint on the plane, hit Q when you're done to return to the select tool. PaintFX brushes have a billion settings each, so if you're not satisfied with the default look there's lots of stuff to tweak. Go to Modify -> Convert -> Paint Effects to Polygons and click on the option box. Set polygon limit to 0, which means no limit, and hit convert. Apply a Maxwell material on the resulting object and hit render. You will get something like this:
The disadvantage is that lots of triangles are produced - e.g. the grass in the image above is just under one million triangles - but there's no other way to do it currently. You could also render the grass with Maya Software and apply it over the Maxwell rendering in post, but you'd have to match the lighting.
- By Mark Bell