Creating a forest

[Devin Johnston]

I've got a small problem where I need to create an animation of a building with a dense forest of trees around it and I need to do it with one or all of these plugins; RPC, Speed Trees or Onyx Trees. The problem I'm having is I'm running out of memory at a certain point and I'm unable to put any more trees in the scene. About the only answer I can think of is to render out the trees by them selves and composite them in the final animation later. This is not a good solution for me; I'd like to do all of this in a single pass. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I should tackle this problem?

[Bugga_Guy]

Did you try billboarding your trees? Use high res trees in the foreground and use billboard trees in further distances.

 

If you are using speed tree instance your trees instead of copying them and just rotate every 5 or so so they don't look like identicals.

[manta]

Two things come to mind...vray proxy meshes and windows x64...

one or both should fix the out of memory problem, haven't had an out of memory error for a long time now...

[Brian Smith]

As Manta said vray proxies is a good choice. And whether you use proxies or not, I would always put good 3D trees in the foreground and billboards in the rear. This is obviously not necessary for stills but a good idea for animations.

[Camby1298]

http://www.gugila.com

[Nic H]

I bought Itoosofts forestpro plugin yesterday, and have been quiet happy with it so far, the stock maps are average but it becomes good when you combine it with you own maps and randomize them.

 

That said I hadnt seen that Groundwiz product before....damnit.

 

I cant get the x-shadow shadow maps to work yet though with vray and im not sure wether they will. Its a good solution for large areas of trees, rocks meshes anything, and is pretty customisable. For backgrounds its excellent at creating variation and depth, put some 3d foreground objects in and you ahve a workable solution.

[Devin Johnston]

Sorry guy's I'm not using Vray.

[Chad Warner]

Definately try the itoosoft program. They have a free version that you can test out.

[notamondayfan]

yup i say itoosoft too. plent of options, and you can use your own maps.

 

maybe also use 3d trees in the foreground, and itoo in the background.

[Devin Johnston]

I've tried the itoosoft software before, the trees didn't seem to be of that high quality and the problem of repeating patters always happens when using billboards. That's why we got Onyx and Speed trees to try and make everything more random and of higher quality.

[Bugga_Guy]

Stick with Speedtree and use instanced trees instead of copies. And use the rt model (low poly ones) - that should work

[Matt McDonald]

Just a few of thoughts.

 

RPC quietly started to support instancing which sure helps out (you'll have to update your plugin).

 

We use xfrog for our primary tree solution. On the rare occasion that we have to create an animation we usually go through and hit the xfrogs with an optimize modifier. On something like a spruce we are able to cut the poly count in half with no noticable defects.

 

Lastly I used to let people on our team decrease the shadow map size of our lights but that solution was quickly abused. For an animation it might be fine because your renderings are going to be pretty small and a few extra jaggies in your shadows might not be noticable.

 

Good luck.