Onyx/Planatus Occidentalis/Plane tree/Sycamore

[Gander0]

Hello

 

Im trying to create a row of mature Plane trees for animation and stills, though am having trouble even doing one without max crashing due to millions of extra polygons. These trees are 20+ meters high and have dense foliage.

 

Does any one have any ideas on this? All ive managed to do so far is create little trees (6 meters) with dense foliage and scale them up (even so the foliage is not dense enough)

 

Attached is an image of what im trying to achieve

 

Many thanks!

[JamesTaylor]

if your using vray how about making them into vrayproxy's....should render then i think, might be slow tho with that many poly's...maybe stop them generating GI

[Gander0]

Thanks James

 

Am using vray proxies excluded from GI but my problem on the mature trees is that cant bring one fully mature tree of that size into max without it crashing.

 

Therefore i havn't even got the chance to save it as a proxy.

[BrianKitts]

Thanks James

Am using vray proxies excluded from GI but my problem on the mature trees is that cant bring one fully mature tree of that size into max without it crashing.

Therefore i havn't even got the chance to save it as a proxy.

 

in the onyx adjustments, get into the branch controls and play with the prunning and the growth start point. Push the start point up and increase your branch density. This will make it more of a dense mesh on the outside and not waste so many polygons on the interior of the tree's foliage.

[oluv]

have you tried to open your tree directly in broadleaf and export to 3ds?

you can try to uncheck twigs, and go down with resolution for branches etc.

if you click "count" you will see how many polys your final tree will have. i don't know what kind of leaf-type your tree is using, but you can select "flat", this will reduce polys even more. for trees in the background i doubt you will see any difference if the leaves are only rectangles.

i have never had problems with 150,000 to 200,000 polys per tree. how many does yours have?

[Gander0]

Thanks Brian

 

I enabled the 3 gig switch and i seem to be getting less crashes, which is handy, will try your technique too, though seems like a lot of trial and errors involved.

 

One quick question... I would do a separate pass for GI for a still image without the trees in order to exclude from GI. I wouldn't want to do this in an animation however. To exclude the trees from GI is it simply a matter of: right click > vray properties > untick generate GI ?

[Gander0]

Thanks for your reply Olaf....now im starting to bury myself.... Broadleaf and Tree Classic seem to have different file extensions which is annoying, do people tend not to work in Tree Classic?

 

A 20 meter high fully mature tree (hardly any light seen through it) seems to add up to at least a million polys, am i just being rubbish at this?

 

Being able to count in Broadleaf before you export makes a lot of sense!

[jow]

A million polys for a mature tree isnt high, i've got some large dense trees pushing 5 million polys!

I dont use Onyx but is the some way with in Onyx to change the leaf from geometry to a simple square plane then use Opacity mapped leafs?

This would buy you more polys, it would push the render times up but hey...

Also i wouldn't exclude the trees from GI, they wont look ever so good...

[Gander0]

Thanks

 

Leaves to square planes sounds like a good plan... Gonna experiment... Things are looking more feasible now though...

[jkletzien]

Gander0, I have been having a similar problem (5million faces + VRay = dead) and have yet to find a solution that doesn't involve going back into scanline techniques - which does work.

 

One thing I didn't try that I thought might work was:

1. 3ds export out of broadleaf (aka painter)

2. Importing these will convert groups of branches and leaves into bite sized objects.

3. Making each bite sized object a VRay proxy

 

But if you've found another workaround I'd love to hear it.

[vizwhiz]

Gender0

 

could you render a mature Tree hi-poly separately? and

Then 'cut and paste' That onto a bitmap plane, so That

 

you have The 'look' but not The hi-poly overhead

not sure if This is what you (might) be looking for

 

but

 

just an Idea

 

a little bit more work, but a lot less polys To deal with

 

Thanks

 

Randy

[Parker1]

Just saw a DEMO on this at SIG. A guy made a forest of ONYX trees and MAX saw the file as having almost no polys...how? VRay PROXIES. Merge in one tree from ONYX. Make a "Multi-Sub Object" material for it (important). Then create a Vray proxy out of it. Now clone that proxy to your hearts content. Check the poly count before and after you clone...no changes. Now render...when each Vray bucket hits a spot with a proxy it will read the data from the Vray mesh file and move on. Very cool way to use Onyx with Vray.

[jow]

Brian, I done a similar thing a couple of months ago, only with Xfrog trees, 100000 of them as a test to see how many trees i could render:cool: -

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/5773/100000trees7dt.jpg

[JamesTaylor]

justin, out of interest what sort of time were you looking at to render that? also at what res and which type of GI?

[jow]

Hey James, GI was IRmap, medium preset with min/max changed to -4/-2 and LC on default settings. Rendered at 1400x1050 on a single AMD x2.

Render time 10 hours including GI, and wait for it, time to Scatter 100000 Proxies... 8 hours!!!!

[Gander0]

Yeah I saw your image before Jow, very impressive. I think its probably easier to get groups of trees looking more mature because you can,t see the light passing through them.

 

Randy. My main problem was getting one decent tree that looked any good, but I guess your method plus forest lite or pro would be a good idea for any demanding future project

 

jkletzien. I managed to use vray proxies fine in the end but my plane trees still werent up to much. For animation I ended up using Itoosoft forest lite, with some bog standard got3d trees. Was a bit gutted as I bought Onyx for the project.

 

I'd be very interested to see if anyone can pull off a decent looking 20m high mature plane tree with dense foliage with Onyx.

 

A photo is attached if anyone fancies a challenge.

 

Would be great to know what sort of leaf materials people use too?

[jkletzien]

Gander0

 

This would be my attempt...a .bro file. I think it comes in at about 2.5M triangles.

 

I have left Twigs, and stems off, the leaf shape is a diamond, and if I were far away in my view I might consider dropping branch levels 2 and 3. If you are doing scanline, I would probably export it (or at least the leaves) directly out as a 3ds using the leaf plate option (it is in the export dialogue box) which will allow you to switch out the leaves for rectangular faces with UVW coordinates - so you can do an opacity mapped material instead of relying on geometry for your leaf edges- You can also make these faces large enough to incorporate more than one leaf each in order to get the kind of density you want. Opacity maps in VRay however are significantly more time intensive than geometry (forgive me if you already know that) so I would just leave the leaves as geometry if you're doing VRay.

 

I like Onyx a lot - but the area that it really is always a huge pain is when you need to do large trees like this.

 

What compounds it is that I don't think the ultimate problem is Onyx - I think it is that when it brings in the tree storm file, it is one object composed of more faces than MAX really likes to have in one object.

 

Anyway, I can't do a rendering for ya' as I am not on a machine with a MAX license, nor have I done any textures for a sycamore, but hopefully this gives you some reference how someone else would approach the problem.

[Gander0]

Many thanks jkletzien

 

Nice tree!

 

As I suspected and like you have mentioned, I dont think onyx is the way to go if you need these kind of mature trees. The poly counts are way too big to easily manage and when you need a few it turns into a pain.

 

Saying that i'm new to Vray proxies and will experiment further when I get some free time. Will post some renders then!

 

Thanks again