Janwalli

PBRT http://pbrt.org/

I like to mix in real 3d grass, simply because most grass hair solutions tend to scatter single blades of grass - which is not the case in reality. So I often mix those memory efficient hair/grass tools and then scatter some real 3D geometry "on top" of that.

well, often it´s enough when you slightly bend the flat leaf. If you are using a quad, just split it into two trinagles. Now you can create a bend, giving some dimension to the leaf - and this is without increasing the complexity. Next step is to use some more geometry for the leaves. This can give very nice results, especially when close up. But the larger the tree, the higher the chance that you will hit a wall , concerning the memory consumption. For the knot holes - thats something you could solve with a texture - create a knothole texture and use it as "decal". That way you could still tile the main bark texture and add some details by adding knothole decals.

those trees look very nice!

thanks for the kind words. I don´t want to highjack this thread, so I will send a more detailed answer via PM. Short answer:I wish to bring the plants to max. So far this hasn´t been possible because I simply was not able to justify to buy a seat, just for converting objects. That might change now because of new licensing schemes.

very nice tree, I really like it! But to be fair - the script might be free, but you need to have max, which costs 3000,- or something like that.

Well, Xfrog might be older, it comes from good old SGI machines. Keep in mind, Xfrog 3.5, the standalone application, has not been updated for a long time. The majority of users wanted to have an integrated solution and because of the there are the Xfrog plugins for Maya and Cinema4D. Those are the recent versions, not the old standalone Xfrog 3.5, which is actually still one of the most powerful modeling tools for plants. Right, but there´s a Copy button, which copies and pastes, either single components or complete hierarchies. It is also possible to instance components or hierarchies by shift-leftclick-drag, if I remember correctly. Actually the user interface offers many little candies. not 100% sure what you mean. You want to hide lower branching levels, but display only leaves and last branching level? Or do you want to pick a certain branch and only display that one with its child objects? Thats indeed not possible. There are some approaches to help in that direction, but not exactly what you are looking for It´s not beyond abstract, but as beginner hard to get the feeling for. But what you are asking for would limit the capabilities to much. The point is, the "final" density comes from several different parameters. All important, all doing something specific and together they result in the overall density of your tree. I made some tutorials, probably they give some additional hints into that direction. You find them on my site http://wallis-eck.de/2013/category/artikel/tutorials/ (some textbased, some videos) I can understand your point and I am sure it would be a good thing to have an additional, simple approach similar to the point above. Density curve per se is simple to understand. But together with some other parameters it can be frustrating at first! actually I didn´t have bigger problems to get Xfrog 3.5 objects into other applications. 3ds, obj and some other formats export the geometry, UV´s and texture paths. Keep in mind, 3ds is an old format only allowing 8 characters. I personaly prefer to use OBJ, but I don´t know how well max works with obj. And if you get halos, then something about the texture is bad. But thats nothing related to Xfrog3.5. right ;-) as I mentioned above, the standalone has not recieved updates for a long time. Recent version is Xfrog5.somewhat, both for Maya and Cinema4D. The standalone is still a great tool, but I think it should be more clear, that there hasn´t been new features inside the standalone for a long while.

well , you asked if there is someone with more then brief experience with Xfrog 3.5 - and I answered yes, as I have more then a brief experience then Xfrog 3.5. Short question, short answer ;-) If you would like to know something more specific, then I can of course also answer a bit more specific. But the only question you asked was, if there is someone...here I am ;-)

to scatter objects, you also can use SurfaceSpread. More dedicated to scatter objects on a terrain, plus it is a bit faster comapred to Mograph. But of course Mograph still is very handy in many places. Silva3D also has plants ready to use for Vray for C4D (shameless self advertising, as those are by me ;-) So in general I also would say that you can do many jobs with the prime version of C4d and Vray.

yes ;-)

you placed a dark, massive object into the center of your picture. Now if people have a bad monitor calibration, then this area indeed will look like a black hole. Probably it woul help if you either can add "some" light, just to bring out the shape of the couch. Probably it even would be enough to adjust the material a bit.

oh, if you are looking for the available file formats - its ready to render for Vray for CInema4D, Cinema4D, Terragen, Vue and for all others Wavefront OBJ.

Hi, I added some lichen objects to my personal site. It´s small parts that you can scatter on rocks or trunks. I plan to add even more and also some tutorials on scattering at a later stage. http://wallis-eck.de/2013/2013/05/project-lichen/

looks promising, although from that angle/position you can´t see much from the room - but this might change when animated. What focal length did you use so far? One thing that could be improved is the outside, looks to flat, without contrast.

but it´s not a RAM problem isn´t it? Because if the harddisc has to be used as "extension" for physical RAM, rendering gets slow of course. The last nature scene I rendered took a bit more then three hours on a simple CoreI7 and it really has a lot of my trees inside (2400*1350px). http://wallis-eck.de/2013/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/landscaping1_37.jpg As noted above, I turn off filtering on color and opacity map and use Lightcache for glossy