Miguel Madail de Freitas Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 Hello everyone. I tried to search for this, no luck at all, so i just have to ask. everyone knows that trees and plants mapped into planes or by using any plugs like RPC and alike only work nicely below 45º more or less... Well, there are alot of situations that need to be rendered from a birds view perspective.There are several tree plugins that have actual models, and only become high res in render, but they're not like the real thing, like photos. Another issue is animation. We can make renders from above and the make a compositing in ps, but with animation this is pratically impossible. So, if anyone knows any tips, or workaround, please post them. I heard of some billboarding techniques, the simple 2 planes, BUT with another (or more) plane, horizontal with a texture of the leaves only. Maybe making some variations of this, and place the planes to make a spherical form, might work. What do you think? [ July 11, 2003, 02:53 AM: Message edited by: Miguel Madail de Freitas ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miguel Madail de Freitas Posted July 11, 2003 Author Share Posted July 11, 2003 No one? ok Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chad Warner Posted July 11, 2003 Share Posted July 11, 2003 I've seen it done with 3 planes- two for the eye level perspective, and one plane parallel to the ground for the aerial perspective. Problem is, I didn't think it looked really good for the eye-level perspectives. Maybe you could have two sets and switch them out? -Chad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 11, 2003 Share Posted July 11, 2003 i have never tried them, but i think rpc's 3d trees would work perfect for this situation. http://www.archvision.com/Gallery.cfm?Content=Trees Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miguel Madail de Freitas Posted July 11, 2003 Author Share Posted July 11, 2003 Nope, Rpc only work from low view. Would be perfect if it did No, with that and with the ability to be affected by light. (i hope u understand me) Not being lit, as they do, but rather the actual images appear to have volume, and change lighting. Ive seen some tutorial of this for maya, and its excelent technique. Ill try to find it and post, maybe it works for other apps too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sergio rocha Posted July 11, 2003 Share Posted July 11, 2003 well, miguel, for accurate lighting and and bird-eye perspectives you only can do it nice with 3d meshes.To be able to get a good result with op maps you´d need an rpc with 360x(6x180) .I separated my matlib by lighting (sun from left(hi and low sun),rigth, top, ambient only ....)because that´s the only way to make them integrated in the picture.When working in projects that require a lot of views,I believe that the best way is to use 3d (poser+deeppaint i.e.) and create the nearest planes in photoshop.When working with planes only (ambient light) the "look at" camera mod can help you a lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Homeless Guy Posted July 11, 2003 Share Posted July 11, 2003 this might be what sergio was hinting on... you could try to render tree meshes at the angle you need, then composit them in photoshop. remember to render them with an alpha channel. if you know what you are doing, you could probably render them with a ground shadow also, if not, you can always airbrush these in photoshop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3d-doctor Posted July 16, 2003 Share Posted July 16, 2003 not so the tree plug speed tree and natfx work at any angle although you need to experiment on face counts etc and my experience with speed tree was a little hit or miss i belive xfrog with it's new optimise lod is also a option and would work in other packages other than max although you may need to spend time working on them having said that i still tend to use the cross planes for flyrounds also you may wish to tackdown the models from nisight which are low poly opacity mapped plane trees which work from any angle few option there to look at Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miguel Madail de Freitas Posted July 16, 2003 Author Share Posted July 16, 2003 Nisight? Whats that? oh another issue. With plugins like speedtree and alike, using radiosity, GI, is something quite hard to acomplish due to high number of polys. One way to sort it out can be through two separate renderings... In animations that can be tricky and time consuming of course, but nevertheless, its an option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nichchris Posted July 16, 2003 Share Posted July 16, 2003 Hi Miguel, Supposedly I can see you from Ghent in my WIP ... LOL! Anyway... I will be posting a long tutorial/disscussion I am doing for someone else of this forum on how to make realistic medium to low poly trees ... based on some ideas I have to do that. This other forum member needs them for game making.. Besides the tutorial and disscussion I will be posting various free tree model(s) of various tree types for the public at large. I will let you know when its done if you are interested. nichchris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 16, 2003 Share Posted July 16, 2003 Besides the tutorial and disscussion I will be posting various free tree model(s) of various tree types for the public at large. nichchris I would be interested in what you came up with, as this is a problem that isn't going away. I have some NPR approaches that I like. They both look good and are low-poly. But when you are trying for pure photo-realism, trees can be tough. Perhaps you would instead want to put the models on the CGA content store for a small fee? There is nothing wrong with you making a little money for your effort if they are good. Anyone that doesn't like them simply won't buy them, everyone else can put up a few bucks of support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pictor Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 I recently came across this problem and in the end opted for fully 3D trees in the form of Bionatics NatFX. It takes a little tweaking but you can get fairly decent looking trees ranging from 5 - 100k polygons depending on age & species which sounds like a lot but when coupled with a renderer which can make use of instanced geometry (Brazil in this case) render times can be reasonable. The (hopefully!) attached is all 3D and was done with GI in Brazil, the original resolution was 5000X3400 pixels and was pieced together from about 6 or 7 seperate renders each containing about 4million polygons. Suffice to say it couldn't be animated in it's present form and although I played with the billboard function in NatFX I wasn't too impressed with the results so would be reluctant to use that approach but I believe with some heavy optimising and standard lighting instead of GI a half decent animation could be achieved. http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=Birdseye.jpg Regards, Pictor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 I recently came across this problem and in the end opted for fully 3D trees in the form of Bionatics NatFX.The result sure looks good. The roads are interesting--it appears to be a shader of some sort that darkens the edges, or else you did a lot of work preparing texturs in advance. The grass areas are the weakest point of the picture--only notable because the rest is so strong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pictor Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 Thanks. I agree with you on the grass texture and also think my roof tiling needs some work. The road texture was created in advance - no special shader used. The full project can be seen at http://www.picto.co.uk/examples/ if anyone's interested. Comments & crits welcome as this was our first archviz project and feedback on how to improve is always good. Rergards, Stephen Pote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 Overall the work is excellent. I do think the textures on the houses (brick/roof) are too neat and too saturated, making the houses look toy-like. The other textures, and the planting, are very good, the windows are treated well. The grass is not such an issue from ground-level, though still a bit over-saturated. the skies are good. But forget the houses, I'll take the cars. The second image in the group enlarges to a cropped version (bottom cut off). The flash website is nice, too. Is the music a piece of Moby? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arkitect Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 I used to have the same problem: 3D trees. Then came across with the Medal of Honor game... and saw the trees they use there. I've had that kind of idea before and tried it, but didn't work that well. Now... those gave me the clue I was lookin for to make good looking low poly 3d trees. Good for animation, birdseye rendering and free. First get the free script treemaker on scriptspot.com. Run it (follow the instructions) but don't make the leaves there. Instead, make a simple plane (4x4segs) and make a material that has leaves mapped on to it and make the alpha map for that very same material of your leaves. Once happy with the plane and the leaves... use the scatter object (with the plane and the trunk) and instanciate (?) the plane. Tweak until you get enough coverage (funny thing to note is that scatter will closely follow the form of the trunk and branches, from bottom to top) and there you go. Low poly 3d trees made by yourself. Hope this helps you or anyone else. Best regards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 do you have any image examples of what you have done that you could post? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pictor Posted July 29, 2003 Share Posted July 29, 2003 Thanks for the comments Ernest, I'll bear them in mind if they ever let me loose on another project. Cars were from those splendid people at 3D02. Very reasonably priced for an Aston Martin I think... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh1587140445 Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 I am now running into the same problem. I have two big renderings coming up for fundraising campaigns and they want birds eye views of the site to show landscaping designs. So right now after reading all of your comments I guess the best way to go is 3D trees, so I am checking out xfrog 3.5 lite, and EASYnat by Bionatics. So if anyone can give me pros and cons for either, that would be very helpful. Because of course they do not tell you the cons of their program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike_sul Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 Hi .. i saw the birds eyeview image that was posted earlier .. very nice indeed .. i would request u .. if possible can u post a closeup cropped shot showing only one white framed window, of any one of the houses ,in detail at actual res .. thanks .. i am interested in seeing the level of quality of the rendered output .. thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pictor Posted July 31, 2003 Share Posted July 31, 2003 Hi Not sure if you wanted to see the trees or the houses so I've posted a bit of each. http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=birdseye_zoom1_1.jpg http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=birdseye_zoom2.jpg http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=birdseye_zoom3.jpg Josh - As the latest release of easyNAT is very similar (but much cheaper!) than my copy of natFX I guess I could give you a quick run down of the things I've learnt over the last few weeks. Pros: Infinite variations from one 'seed' - avoid those nasty visual repetitions the human brain is so good at spotting Physically accurate specimens - great for when you have to model an existing tree on a site. Loads of different species - even if you can't find the exact specimen you can usually get something close to it. Rapid tree generation - it can build a 2 million polygon tree awful quick. Age & season controls 3D shrubs & flowers - makes creating these pesky rascals an absolute doddle. They look good even close up too. Cons: High polygon count - especially when you crank the tree age up but I guess this is to be expected with a complex organic form. Close up detail - some types of tree suffer a bit when you move right in, I've found this can be corrected though by using a bit of meshsmooth on the more visible parts such as trunk & major branches. Crap textures - most of the supplied textures are pretty useless close up, I ended up scanning leaves and taking digi photos of bark which will give you much better results. Pruning - Most trees planted on new developments have undergone some pruning at an early age to create more abundant foliage, NatFX isn't able to simulate this automatically and is only available on a very few select 'seeds' so I often found myself manually tweaking the geometry to avoid the younger trees looking too sparse and 'wild' where in reality they would probably be fresh from the nursery looking all plump & juicy. Maxtreme - seems to fight constantly with maxtreme when the poly count gets over 100k or so resulting in crashes, although personally I think this is more the inherent instability of Maxtreme (sort it out nvidia!). Overall I think it's an excellent bit of software, the trees look nice & realistic and the shrubs & flowers are even better and when you consider how many hours hard labour it would take just to create one tree to that level of detail it really becomes very good value for money. Hope this helps Best Regards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh1587140445 Posted August 1, 2003 Share Posted August 1, 2003 Pictor - Thanks a lot! A lot of good information. And those pics you just posted look great also. Looks a lot better than if you were to do it post I am sure. But then again, i have not seen any pictures of trees from a birds eye view. So does anyone have any experience with xfrog? Or even images to post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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