Rhino render / raytrace - instances

If you had a surface (perhaps with holes, perhaps irregular shape) do you have any tips about how best to distribute a clump of grass around such that the surface is well covered?

It would be great if there was a tool to fairly evenly spread across a surface. Perhaps this is something for grasshopper.

Also, from my experiments, Rhino still seems to be struggling with drawing all the geometry. I wonder if this is somewhere that proxies help? Could just have a distribution of points or simple objects that only show as the complex geometry at render time?