Grass - u can use simple displacement with cellular in displacement slot.
For my taste, its too cgish. Needs a lot of tweaks :))
agree with you because it's still in progress with no post and materials tweaking,
the worst thing in the story is : my max file is corrupted after making a copy of a palm, and i didn't turn on autosave O_o but i have a two days old scene ...
Anyway, maybe it's a good thing so i can make it more acceptable, i will keep it until the blur bug is fixed.