Botanist: Lighting sketch with test grass

We had this idea that our botanist would want to be around as many plants as possible, so we decided that part of his floor would be grass!  We're experimenting with different ways to generate the grass, and are somewhat happy with what we've found so far.

In this render the grass looks pretty bad, but that's because we kept the grass way too low poly.

And since we're new to consumer Renderman, we wanted to try to sketch in the daytime lighting just to get our feet wet with the process.  The first pass was pretty bad, just relying on an environment light.  It kind of makes sense as dawn/dusk (kind of), but then there is the sun right there shining in your face.  The second pass looks much better - we're really excited to move forward!

Without further adieu -