just got onyxtree

[SgWRX]

i really like it. i'm a total newbie at architectural vis. i was worried b/c of no demo but a lot on here recommended it. i quick dropped in some trees on a practice house (wip) and really like these results.

[SgWRX]

forgot to attach

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Thanks for the post. It is good to see the newbie first try work this sort of thing. We get to see a lot of the "it is actually possible to get something this nice if you...." material. Don't see the "yeah, but what will _I_ get" work. One of my big complaints with some software is "OK, I buy it. I press the 'go' button and what do I get? Do I get something understandable that I can work with to get what I want OR do I get a screen full of black with no idea where to start." It looks like Onyx is giving you something useful from the get go.

 

What kind of changes in render time are you getting?

How easy/hard was it to set up this scene?

Tell all! And share your progress. I'm keen to learn, as I'm in the market for plants too.

[SgWRX]

the scene is pretty basic, the building is pretty much a 10min quick thing created for visual reference so i didn't just have a small grouping of plants in space. i use mental ray and this is the mrsun mrsky with FG turned on draft quality. then i used the onyx plugin to drop in the pine trees and 6 bushes and that was it. they have materials that look great and like other programs you can make your own materials. i visually previewed the trees by looking at the small bitmap files they include with the tree libraries - they have a lot of them on their website so you can see a lot of what you're going to get when you order.

 

i tried xfrog and easynat. xfrog was really cool, but it seemed like a lot more than i wanted, you can really build and tweak everything you can think of. onyx lets you tweak a ton of things too and it so far it just seems a little easier in onyx.

 

easynat was cool too, a plant simulator, but for some reason i couldn't get 3d trees to under 400,000 polys. the time of season and age thing was great.

 

it's probably lack of full understanding and needs that made me not go with those. oh, i also tried demo versions of VUE but that seemed like just a waste for trees only. vue is really cool, when i have more time i'll study it more.

 

the trees show 12k polys when i select them, i have them in a low-poly preview mode. the pines are actually about 49k polys and the bushes are about 130k polys. you can tweak the poly count on each plant. you can use adjust poly count by using detail sliders for each part of plant (trunk, main branches, secondary, tertiary, leaves etc.) you can do all of this right in max with the plugin.

 

to me, i just decided that i want to at least be able to drop something in without spending too much time and that's what onyx turned out to be. you can still do all sorts of customization which i'll learn over time.

 

back to practicing modeling right now but maybe will have another test image soon.

[malevy]

Hey that looks good. I am also a newbie and have yet to try trees but will soon. how much did the plugin cost and do they have a student discount ??

 

the scene is pretty basic, the building is pretty much a 10min quick thing created for visual reference so i didn't just have a small grouping of plants in space. i use mental ray and this is the mrsun mrsky with FG turned on draft quality. then i used the onyx plugin to drop in the pine trees and 6 bushes and that was it. they have materials that look great and like other programs you can make your own materials. i visually previewed the trees by looking at the small bitmap files they include with the tree libraries - they have a lot of them on their website so you can see a lot of what you're going to get when you order.

 

i tried xfrog and easynat. xfrog was really cool, but it seemed like a lot more than i wanted, you can really build and tweak everything you can think of. onyx lets you tweak a ton of things too and it so far it just seems a little easier in onyx.

 

easynat was cool too, a plant simulator, but for some reason i couldn't get 3d trees to under 400,000 polys. the time of season and age thing was great.

 

it's probably lack of full understanding and needs that made me not go with those. oh, i also tried demo versions of VUE but that seemed like just a waste for trees only. vue is really cool, when i have more time i'll study it more.

 

the trees show 12k polys when i select them, i have them in a low-poly preview mode. the pines are actually about 49k polys and the bushes are about 130k polys. you can tweak the poly count on each plant. you can use adjust poly count by using detail sliders for each part of plant (trunk, main branches, secondary, tertiary, leaves etc.) you can do all of this right in max with the plugin.

 

to me, i just decided that i want to at least be able to drop something in without spending too much time and that's what onyx turned out to be. you can still do all sorts of customization which i'll learn over time.

 

back to practicing modeling right now but maybe will have another test image soon.

[SgWRX]

i do remember seeing a student discount on the website. i got the super bundle for $595 which has storm which is the plugin and bambo, broadleaf, conifer, flowers and palm. each of those have their own program (which runs outside of max) to tweak or build your trees too. oh, and one option that is neat from within the programs, is you can export as a bitmap or tga file and use it as a texture on a plane with the opacity map for distant tree lines, or i imagine, close ups or other non-animation. so basically you can make your own billboards. as well as exporting them as full 3d .3ds models.

 

here's another quick deal, just dropped in a few others.

 

EDIT: the one thing i've found is that unless you're doing a plane with a tree mapped onto it, it's hard to get low polys. i thought i saw that evermotion made low poly trees that looked pretty good. i think my whole thing was trying to get realistic results with as few polys as possible.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Remember a few years ago playing a bit with somebody's solution which could create low poly trees with groups of branches and leaves mapped to a single poly. Careful arrangement of these and adequate enough trees, iirc.

 

No clue which it was.

[Billabong]

Just thought I would chime in and say I just bought the superbundle for max to , waiting on my email dl link, really looking forward to using this proggy

[SgWRX]

i haven't searched nor read the manuals entirely, but it seems that you can't use flowers within tree storm? i've posted something in WIP showing a few more trees. just dropped them in. still haven't played with textures yet. time has been very tight.

[mikedeerf]

Also just got Onyx. Love it.

I created a couple different versions of the same tree with different poly counts. I use Mental Ray, not VRay, so I can't use proxies.

I have a 25k, 35k, and 135k version of the main tree I used last week.

 

The front 2 trees in each shot got the 135k tree; the rest were the low(er) poly trees.

 

Last project I didn't have Onyx, so I used trees I exported from Vue 5 Infinite.

Yes, Onyx has high poly counts. Yes, I had to play with rendering settings quite a bit, render in strips, etc. (5million+ polys in total scene).

But believe me, the pain was NOTHING compared to the pain caused by the high poly count PLUS opacity mapping from the Vue trees.

 

Onyx' default is color by vertex, so there's no textures to load, no opacity maps, etc. I did put bark texture on my 135k tree, but left the others alone.

 

Other advantage over Vue: in Vue, you can select a poly count... sort of. Think of a single slider with "worse than RPC, but renderable" on the left and "just one of these will melt your processor" on the right.

 

I love that with Onyx, I can have a lot of large leaves, and eliminate stems, twigs, branches selectively.

 

Vue is all or nothing - you want low quality branches? you get low quality leaves too.

 

I used a couple trees way in the background from Onyx that were nothing but leaves. Just needed something to cover a spot in the background image. 5k polys, look just like the foreground trees at that distance.

[SgWRX]

here's something interesting, i was playing around tonight and loaded up the Cedrus libani 'Aurea' 2 tree in tree storm. when i hit the count button, it showed 6 million. i tried to render and got the out of memory error with mental ray and then max 9. i tried reducing the count to around 2 million polys and got the same errors.

 

i restarted max and made a copy array of some high poly spheres, to the tune of 2 million polys and it rendered no problem.

 

next i went into onyx conifer and exported that same tree, Cedrus libani 'Aurea' 2, it showed a poly count of 6 million again. it was a 200mb 3ds file. i imported that and rendered. no problems. max showed the 6 million polys.

 

i found that i also ran out of memory in max when i tried to convert the tree from a low poly proxy display (12 polys i think it was) to the highly detailed display. my thought was, i could convert it to a mesh and it would render.

 

hm.

 

EDIT: i've only got max 32 bit, windows xp and 2gb of ram.