Trying out plant plugins

[Leah Cooper]

There's a painful shortage of good info on plant plugins out there, on the internet in general and on forums. I've spent the past few weeks tearing my hair out trying to find one that will suit my needs in max 6, and I thought I'd jot down my findings in case anybody else finds it helpful. I'm certainly no expert on optimizing scenes for good render times, I'm just a self-taught freelancer doing what I can. My machine may have issues that will not correlate with the behavior of these products on other people's computers-- this is just my experience with trying to test these plugins.


I have an Opteron 150 machine with a GeForce FX5950 Ultra video card, and I'm running max 6 in OpenGL, with no other plugins besides the plant stuff.

My current project is two mid-detail hopsital flyarounds about a minute or so each for a DVD-- one will be 15 acres with many buildings, currently I'm working on a smaller one.

For these tests I'm trying to add plants to a 30,000 poly building scene with 1 sunlight with raytraced shadows and 1 skylight with shadow-casting turned off. (I'm still trying to find a good light dome script, since max's GI is so screamingly SLOW). I'm trying to keep the render time below 2 or 3 minutes a frame.



When I try to scatter 1500 instanced AEC scotch pines (AEC trees are the kind that come with max 6, this one 68,915 polys each at medium detail) across the landscape, max says it's run out of memory and crashes. (considering the scene would end up with over 100 million polys, can ya blame it?)

When I try to scatter 1500 instanced 2D Bionatics EasyNat pines (2 billboards with a trunk, for a grand total of 4 polys each) max instacrashes with no error message. I reloaded the scene, collapsed the pine to an Editable Mesh, and then the trees scattered successfully. With ALL other geometry but the trees turned off, the render time was 31min. (WTF?!) And this isn't even taking into account the weird texture-glitching problem I've been having with this one-- every so often the plants totally wig out on me. I called the number on the Bionatics website for help, and the guy who picks up is always very nice and helpful, but he's not a tech and it took days to get any reply from the support people when I emailed them-- and about a WEEK before they bothered to tell me that the guy who fixes stuff in EasyNat is on vacation for 3 weeks so the problem won't get fixed till then. (ARGH!!)

When I scatter (or SpeedForest) 1500 SpeedTree weeping willows (RT_low detail, 628 polys), the resulting scene renders in 2min 35sec. Using three different types of trees instead of 1, the render time went up to 7 minutes. With the 3 different types of trees, switching from raytraced shadows to SpeedShadows made the render time 1 min 25secs-- but I haven't figured out yet how to use raytraced shadows on the buildings and Speedshadows on just the trees. I have asked the support people at SpeedTree and Digimation a few dumb questions, and they replied helpfully within hours, doubtless they can help me with that too.

I can't figure out how the heck to make 1500 RPC trees. Scatter doesn't work, SpeedForest works fine except that it makes instanced objects and apparently RPCs go all wacky if you instance them. The RPCs come with their own thing called 'mass populate' which I think would spread them around, but for the life of me I can't make heads nor tails of it (yeah yeah I should dig up some instructions, but frankly I'm getting sick of this). I finally just arrayed 1500 Red Ash trees in a few rows, and even without any lights or anything else in the scene it took 2 minutes to render.

Xfrog's demo of Xfrog TUNE, the program for turning the poly count on the trees way down, has its Save and Export functions disabled. All the sample Xfrog trees have massive polycounts, comparable to that AEC spruce or even four times as bad. So, I can't effectively make a test with those to compare with the others, though I really wish I could. Would anybody happen to have an Xfrog model tuned down to under 2,000 polys, that I could use for such a test??

Onyx doesn't appear to have any demos for their plant plugins. I've emailed them asking about it yesterday and have not yet received a response.

I haven't tried the Itoo stuff yet, though I might-- free is cool, but always-facing 2D billboards tend to look pretty crappy.



Quality-- For the general look of the trees, I like the Xfrog trees the best. EasyNat comes in a close second. Speedtree is alright, though not fantastic. RPC trees are hard to compare with the rest, they look.... a bit funky. The AEC trees don't appear to have any textures, and don't really look very good.

Customizability-- Xfrog and Bionatics have very advanced options-- the trees can be grown to different ages, the types and sizes of leaves and whatnot modified, to some extent even without using the actual tree-modeling programs Xfrog and Bionatics make. SpeedTree comes with its cad program, and the foresting utility that also comes with it has all the usual transformation options of a Scatter, plus an option to keep the trees from colliding.

Shadows-- Xfrog trees don't seem to have any problems casting shadows. Likewise, EasyNat trees do just fine with raytraced shadows, and you can even squirrel by with mapped ones in certain situations. RPCs don't cast shadows at all, unless you go through gyrations to render out a projection map for the light, which would be a pain to untangle if there are buildings also present. SpeedTrees cast kinda funky shadows, I'm going to need to figure out how to use the shadow type that comes with them while still using raytraced shadows on the buildings, but that shouldn't be impossible, especially since I'm probably going to render the trees in their own run and combine them in post.

Plant Selection-- The Xfrog plant library is huge and wonderful-- problem is you can only buy them in big sections, so if you really need like 5 different trees that are in different categories, you'll end up spending a lot of money. EasyNat has a much smaller library, but you can pick the trees you want individually. SpeedTree has a medium-big library, and as far as I can tell when you get the program you get access to the whole thing! Only about a dozen AEC plants came with max, probably you can get more elsewhere, but I wouldn't bother.

Price is fairly comparable for most of these, if I get all the components I'd need-- it'll probably add up to about $500.



Long (long, long, aggravating!!!) story short, right now it's looking like I might get SpeedTree.

I encourage other folks to comment on their experiences with plant plugins, and what the different ones are good for.

[Per Petersson]

Hi
Did a small comparision months ago.. choosed Speedtree in front of Bionactics... think most because of speed flexiblity and price. U have to use NatEx to edit?
I made a scene with total 600 trees (9 instanced variants) - every tree about 3000 poly (because I have to come close)
Render w VRAY with GI and VRAY-shadow and they come up remarkable quick with nice shadows... minutes..
You have to spend some time make better trees with new leaves becuase the enlosed tree are crap. Disadvantage is that the tree at distance, for example in an aerial views, come up quite sterotypic as you said, and the leaves-poly are pointed in a way so either you get leaves rendering flat bright or in shadow depending of your viewpoint and the sun. There are only a small angle where you get the nice blended light into the leave branch.
Enclosed a 3D-sketch

[Brodie Bentos]

Hmm Ive gone though sililar motions quite a few times still yet to have satisfactory results.

- For 2D photoshop gives the most joy exept the shadows get tricky for dense foliage

- I have found a nice way to populate a surface without plugins, first a draw a spline on a crazy random path that criss crosses across your surface. Then I use a conform space warp to meld the spline with the surface, assuming there is some changes in elevation in your surface. Then I use the spacing tool and wham hundreds of trees, no plugins.

- RPCs were reasonably successful thought the tree quality can be a bit lacking

[Pradipta Seth]

very nice and helpful article. thanks Gnarly for the comparism. i worked with xFrog and it's so heavy that i could not make much out of it for most of the work. now i am playing with Onyx tree after I saw Jeff using this also. i'd say it's good, not fantastic but still can be tweaked to the likings. also got medium range library and not so heavy in mesh like xFrog.

compositing with photoshop seems very tricky and takes more time in adusting and making shadows etc.

[Isaac van den Berg]

Old thread but I was wondering if any new findings have occured?

[olaf lubanski]

when rendering with vray, you can use vraymeshes with full-polygon trees like those from xfrog or onyx, and scatter them around as instances. they will render fine in vray, i don't know what the limit in polygons is, but vray never made problems. but avoid using opacity maps, this will kill render-times.
i had scenes with thousands of onyx trees and bushes, 6 different ones, that were instanced as vraymeshes, and they rendered pretty well.

[Gary Allison]

i had scenes with thousands of onyx trees and bushes, 6 different ones, that were instanced as vraymeshes, and they rendered pretty well.

I am also fighting this tree thing (I'm not the only one...that's comforting). Can you show us some samples? What kind of render times do you see? Have you tried large renders (3000+ px wide) with lots of Onyx trees?

[PIERRE ZERROUKI]

keep in touch, i've just bought xfrog 3.5 lite...
don't have time to read carefully manuals: trees are big and when i render them with vray, message arrives: some faces have got wrong uw maps, in loop.
next week end, i'll see...

[justin ottoway]

@PIERRE,
try importing your xfrog models in 3ds format instead of xfr format,it should fix the mapping problem...

[Cesar Enrique Gomez Escalante]

Hello everybody.....Excuse me Justin OTTOWAY, but, I have the same maping problem, I tryed your method, I have used the xfrog program and export one palm to 3DS format, and at the time of importing the tree palm to max, the maping coordinates are solved and ok, BUT the opacity is lost, so in the render, foliage is not transparent, and you can see the plane that has "stamped" the texture of the foliage, and instead of be transparent, it is grey, I will be pleased if you can help us all with this, thank you.

Best Regards.