Advice on Plant Editors

[Kimble]

Ok I'm down to 2 plant editors.

 

XFrog or OnyxTree

 

What are your thoughts on the 2.

 

We are using 3DS and others are using AutoCAD with AccuRender

 

thank you

 

Kimble

[Trick]

I have both.

 

XFrog is more of a procedural modeler. You can create very complex structures from psychedelic grids to (obviously) trees, bushes and plants. Almost all parameters can be animated but some natural wind behaviour requires extensive knowledge of both the program and the physics of the tree/wind/gusts itself. The same goes for making a really good tree. It really requires a lot of effort to get better trees then Onyxtree. I probably didn't have the patience to do so just because Onyx is far easier to use. The only upgrade I have seen in the last 2 (or 3 or 4) years is v4 which is C4D and Maya only. The better integration they promised for Lightwave and 3dsMax a long, long time ago will probably never come.

 

Onyxtree IMO is a better solution if you want easy, fast and good trees/bushes/palms/weeds/flowers in a very simple interface. If you use Max you'll also get the TreeStorm plugin: it generates random trees (from a saved file out of the seperate Onyx tree/plant editors) inside the Max interface and takes very good care of all windparameters.

 

For both the big minus is polygon count. So if you want lots of trees AND fast rendering you'll need a renderer that supports instancing (Like proxies in VRay) and you better exclude the trees from GI by baking the diffuse lighting first. With Max's extremely slow UV spreading this can be a dauting task.

 

All in all: I prefer Onyx (Complete suite) just because I don't have the time to tweak all parameters in XFrog. Greenworks (XFrog) offers many plant collections but because they all have flat leaves (resulting in bad lighting and flickering because of the thin lines in the renders) I don't like them.

 

If you don't have a renderer that supports instancing there are 2 more alternatives: NatFX and Speedtree. ATM I'm also using Lightwave which is not supported by both. From the galleries I can not see any spectacular things, but generally this can be deceiving.

[3dp]

over the years i have used all the big name plant toys working at various places

when it came to put the ££$$ where i wanted i went with easy nat for max and i have just upgraded to a full blown version of nat fx

 

onyx is long in the tooth and needs a upgrade

xfrog if you have the libraries it heps to modfy trees/plants

both of the above produce huge 3d files

 

speedtree is good but limited i find out of the box and it does not work well with some 3rd party renderengines - did not play around too much with the plant editor

 

bionatics nat fx/easy nat has a wide range of plant pretty simple interface and can produce plants in all resolutions

 

however some plants suck and others take a few goes to get something that you know is right you also need to watch your system ram - it eats it alive you'll need 2 gig minimum to get a decent realworld planting scenes even with the hybrid plants

[skana]

Before you make your decision on either Onyx or X Frog, take a look at natFX for 3ds max...the latest version, which was just released a few weeks ago has some great new features: normal mapping for the hybrid trees, automatic wind effects, pruning tools, and better optimization functions (all of these integrated into the 3ds max interfac, of course)...The best part about it is that Bionatics is currently running a 2 for 1 promotion on their seed credits until August 31st...check out the website at: http://www.bionatics.com