3d trees : Bionatics vs Speedtree vs Onyxtree

[alexg]

Hi Guys

 

This topic has been around for awhile, but I'm still curious.

 

Based on speed, quality, and photorealism for animation purposes, which one do you think is best ? I narrow this to 3 plugins : Bionatics NatFx, Speedtree or Onyxtree ?

 

Regards

Alex G

[dbarc]

We bought bionatics recently so haven't fully got to grips with it. You buy 'seeds' off their website and then specify the age of the sample you would like and it generates an accurate model based on scientific data - pretty impressive.

 

The downside is we have had all sorts of problems, some of them bugs which are hopefully adressed in the new revision. The main problem though is if you have a substantial number of plants in your scheme the polygon count goes through the roof. There are lower poly options which address this but we haven't had great results with them in terms of realism.

 

I guess this is a problem with all the plugins to be honest. If you have alot of shrubs, grasses etc.. in your scheme, it is very difficult to get good results without creating an unmanageable poly count

[Noise]

Don't forget XFrog.

[oluv]

Onyx is great although it might look a bit old-fashioned.

still it is very flexible and lets you create every plant you can imagine. you don't need to buy "seeds", you build your plant either from scratch, with 4 of the plant-modelers "broadleaf" "conifer" "bamboo" and "palm" (and now a new "flower" model coming) or you can edit the provided sample plants for your needs. there is more than enough material to play around and the good thing is that it is very easy to create your own trees. the user interface is also quite easy to understand.

when you use max or viz tree storm is a very helpful plugin to bring your plants directly into your enviroment. you have 3 preview modes, and with the simple preview you won't have any performance problems, even if you insert hundrets of trees with 200.000 polys each. with tree storm there is a wind-generator, so your trees are animated automatically and you don't need to worry about anything when creating animations.

 

maybe some drawbacks of the program: the trees are not textured automatically, but use vertex-color as material, but with a mouse click you can create uv-coords for each plant-part and assign materials and textures manually. instead of the complex leafs you can also create simple plate-leafs and texture them with alpha-maps to save polygons. or you can substitute the leafs with your own objects etc.

although you have lots of control about how detailed your tree is you don't have any advanced billboarding possibilites similar to easynat or natfx. so most of the time your onyx-trees will have around 200.000 polys or even more.

if you use vray and export your trees as vraymesh you shouldn't have problems with poly-counts. i once created a scene with 3 different onyx trees instanced about 5000 times and rendered with gi in vray, it was not a problem at all.

[Bugga_Guy]

I had the same querry as you awhile back. They are all good, however we went with speed tree for a coupple of reasons

 

1. low geometry - its great for when you need to cover a master plan with more than 100 trees, and you can set variences so when you copy a tree speed tree will make copies random hieght so they do not look all the same (a great time saver)

 

2. you can make trees using speed tree cad or edit the current ones.

 

3. uses speed shadow - instead of using raytraced shadows you can use speed tree shadows to produce the same effect as raytraced without the long wait.

 

4. you can make the trees animate to wind simply by applying the a numerical strength value.

 

5. has a pretty decent library with content already mapped. You can also purchase additional content (but quite expensive)

 

Only one downfall, if you go up close the trees look alittle like something for a video game, also you can't collapse the tress/bushes to editable meshes (so you can't import to anyother software). But its great if you plan on making scenes that has large number of trees.

[alexg]

Thank you, guys for all your insights

 

We decided to go with Speedtree. We need it to fill foresty background without too much polys and still looks quite good.

Tried Bionetics and billboard / hybrid setting is not quite good, have to go to highest setting for good result, but it takes too much time to render.

 

Regardrs

AlxG

[vizwhiz]

hi There Alex

 

i wasnt following This Thread yesterday, oops

i have heard of some kind of kink between SpeedTree and Vray

 

are you using Vray or is only your Brother using Vray??

The chaosforum has some Threads about This, i am repeating

 

what i read, but not sure about The particulars

and from what i understand Vray 1.5 just came out last week

 

hope This helps

 

**

 

"Vray hates SpeedTree"

 

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6492

 

**

 

Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 1:39 am Post subject:

 

Last time I checked, there were several problems with speedtree:

 

(*) Sometimes the tree trunk is not smoothed correctly and appears faceted. I have not been able to get this to work properly - I suppose because SpeedTree is using some new stuff in 3dsmax that VRay does not yet support.

 

(*) The normals for the leaves render always in the same direction (towards the camera) - probably because of the same reason as above.

 

(*) Some speedtree's have overlapping faces which, combined with opacity mapping, brings rendering to a crawl. A work-around is to force 2-sided materials and increase the secondary rays bias - although this will affect the rest of the scene too.

 

These issues have made us to not recommend using SpeedTree with VRay. There are other plugins that work better (Bionautics, I think, is one).

 

Best regards,

Vlado

 

**

 

Vlado is The Vray programmer (i Think)

 

Randy

[Ernest Burden III]

There was a very useful post here a few months ago that showed examples of each. I will search it out later if someone doesn't beat me to it.

[alexg]

Vizwhiz

 

Thank you, but it's a bit too late.

Already purchase speed tree, but still haven't try it on.

Fortunately we are using scanline only for this animation.

Might try it with vray later on.

 

Might try to get onyxtree treestorm too. Been seeing good results with onyx but they are a bit slow to respond to our email so we decided to go ahead with digimation speedtree.

 

Bionatics and Digimation sales are really quick to respond. Even on weekends. Thumbs up for them.

[sgkmania]

"Vray hates SpeedTree" and Xfrog too.

[John Dollus]

Xfrog isn't so bad as long as you limit the GI calcs to receive only on the plants. Opacity maps in general seem to have always been a bit of a sore spot for vray.

[Ismael]

Some tips on Op/Trees and Vray:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13213&highlight=tree

 

Ismael