Landscape Architect Setup

[wsmith]

Hey all-

Just found this forum today and I am already impressed with the community. I am a landscape architect and our firm is currently exploring moving into the 3d visualization realm which is quite an undertaking for us because we are so used to doing just sketches, plans, and details. What software packages would you reccomend for us to get started with? We have debated 3ds vs. maya internally and have come up with 3ds as the frontrunner because of it's integration with autocad and overall ease of use.

Since our office is very particular about softscape (i.e. trees, shrubs, perrenials, annuals, etc); what tree modeling program/plugin has the overall best look and ease of use? We are leaning towards bionatic natfx, would this be preferable over Onyx or Xfrog? Which is better for out of the box results with textures? Also, where does one go for finer smaller plant models/creation; model libraries?

That is about it for now, I apoligize for all the questions but we are in the fact finding stage of this process and we are having some difficulty finding people in our exact profession who have been down this route before.

Thanks,

William

[vizwhiz]

hi There

 

Wsmith

 

welcome To The Greatest 3d Forum on This planet

 

(imho)

 

also, in addition To or in lieu of 3d plants

 

you may want To consider adding bitmap Plants

using a FotoChop program after rendering The Bldg/Site

 

This can save rendering Time and add flexibility To your workflow

This also allows you To Take "Exact Photos" of specified Landscape

 

Plants That may NOT occur anywhere else That is specific To your

Landscape design

 

a little extra work upfront but you can create your own Photo Library

i have To do This a lot myself

 

**

 

a link or Two To look at for bitmaps plants (There are others)

 

http://www.imagecels.com/

 

**

 

hope This helps

 

Thanks

 

Randy

[chuck]

is this software move for designing in 3d, or creating finished views of your buildings?

 

i'd take a look at sketchup...certainly not photo real, but that's not the point. they have a free 8hr demo you can download for free...

 

chuck

[Jeff Mottle]

Hi William,

 

Welcome to the forums!

 

I just got back from ASLA down in Ft. Lauderdale and found that a lot of your collegues are in the same boat. Everyone wants to get into 3D, but they do not really know where to start. It sounds like you are a bit more versed in the applications that are out there, so you are ahead of the game in that regard.

 

Perhaps you could answer a few more question for us, as it will help determine the direction you can go.

 

1. Who will be doing this visualization work? Will you be hiring trained visualzation professionals or is there someone in your office who is well versed in 3D already?

2. What kind of budget do you have to start this up?

3. How often and how many 3D images/scenes will you be doing a month?

4. Do you need photoreal renderings, or are non-photorealistic images more appropriate?

5. Will most of your work be compositing landscaping on site photographs or will you be creating everything from scratch?

6. Are you prepared to invest at least 3-6 months of solid ramp up time to get a 3D process in place?

7. How many people will working in 3D?

8. Anything else you can tell us about your needs and requirements.

[oluv]

if you want photoreal results i would of course vote for 3ds max (or viz) but only because of the perfect integration of vray. vray is a great rendering-engine that can deal with huge amounts of polygons and has a very fast GI-rendering. you can use thousands of full-polygon 3d-trees (from onyx or xfrog) and vray will give you perfect results. i had scenes with about 2000 onyx-trees, i used up to 6 different plants (3 trees, 3 shrubs), that i scattered as references around the landscape, varying in size and rotation, and you hardly could see any repeating tree-pattern, i also used gi with skylight and vray always gave me nice results. but be prepared to have at computer with at least 2gb or more. on my example rendering i already had problems with memory (only 1gb) because of several mapped ortho-photos that were about 5000x5000 pixel huge. still on my shitty 1,9 ghz P4 notebook it took about 1 hour to render the scene at the original 3000x2000 resolution.

 

for trees i would suggest onyx treestorm. it is very flexible, you don't need to buy any seeds, but can build your own plants. unfortunately you have to care about texturing on your own, there are no textures out of the box. i would suggest to prepare your own standard tree library of plants that you will mostly use, already mapped and textured in max that you can import and spread around in your project when needed.

xfrog is great, but the integration of xfrog-trees is not so flexible as treestorm. i would avoid bionatics, as their trees are very expensive. you have to pay for ever single seed you want.

 

i would also suggest to have a look at rhinoceros as a nice modeling-alternative to max. i prefer rhino because of its simplicity. it is easy to use and the support is also great. if you are good in autocad, you will love rhino. there are some nice plug-ins that make rhinoceros outstanding, have a look at easysite (http://www.cadeasy.com) it is a mesh-based landscape modeling-tool very nice for roads etc...

as already mentioned sketchup is also great for the beginning.

 

but you can also try software-packages that are fully optimized for landscape modeling and visualisation. have a look at 3dnature.comand visual nature studio. it is a more gis-based approach, but if you have lots of gis-data you can import it directly and define your ecosystems according to your shape-files.

 

aprops ecosystems: maybe you can also have a look at vue infinite from e-onsoftware.com

seems to be a perfect and complete solution for landscape with an own plant-modeler, gi-renderer, etc...

 

maybe you find something that suits your needs!

 

good luck!

[Fernando Lino]

take a look at Vue 5 Infinite, it's very affordable and for landscape is pretty good

 

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/

[monkeysee]

Hi wsmith!

 

I used to work for Lovejoy, a landscape architect here in the UK. We used to use a combination of 3ds max / viz and autocad for ground modelling (hard and soft landscaping) and Bionatics EASYnat for planting (http://www.bionatics.com). EASYnat gives you a good level of control, has a wide variety of species available, and produces physically accurate models of plants/trees at whatever stage of its life that you want. As for a rendering engine - I'm a firm believer in the "its the artist, not the tool" principal

[bjornkn]

I think the first you should do is to answer Jeffs questions.

If this is your first venture into 3D land you should definitely try to figure out what your needs and budget are, as wella s how much time you're willing to spend learning it.

You should also look at what you get in - will it be 2D site plans, 3D buildings etc? Will you have to model buildings yourself?

I dont' think there is one single program that will solve all your needs.

SketchUp is great for making the site and buildings, roads etc, and it is very easy to learn and fast to use. But, as mentioned above, it's not making photo-realistic renderings. However it does import and export 2D/3D dwg files very well, as well as exporting in other formats that can be imported into other programs.

Vue is also great. It has a good and pretty fast renderer as long as you stay away from the highest quality GI modes. It is absolutely fantastic when you need to make scenes with thousands or millions of trees and other objects, it has great node-based functions for textures etc. It can also create plants etc for use in other programs, but this is maybe not enough for you, because you have far less control than with Onyx for instance.

Trees and plants can be used in two basically different ways, either as full 3D models, or as flat "billboards" with alpha mapped flat planes with an image with transparent background on it. This can be done in Vue, as well as SketchUp and all(?) other 3D programs. Full 3D trees and plants can easily grow your scenes to unmanageable sizes, and the render times may be much higher than desireable. For still images you can often get very good results with billboards, but for animations and moving camera it will often look bad.

It's also a lot easier and faster to make new trees and plants from photos than to create them in full 3D.

 

Budgetwise I think you could easily buy SketchUp, Vue, Onyx and Lightwave and still spend a lot less money than for buying one single Max license?

You should start by taking a look at http://www.sketchup.com/?sid=24 which is the landscape section.

Here is an example of SketchUp output, with site plan from landscape architects working in 2D. No trees or plants there though..