3d tree solution

[slanier]

I am currently the 3d artist on a large scale environment project. I am at the point where I need to start filling this environment up with foliage and natural elements.

 

I have been researching the various software for approaching this but I still dont have a good idea on the best solution.

Here are my needs, what I have looked at, and what I am working with.

Any ideas or suggestions will be much appreciated.

 

I am looking to populate many many acres with trees... I am dealing with specific tree types so having the actual tree is a bonus, but I can always use a tree editing software to get close enough. I need to populate areas with certain tree types based on percentage... so filling up a designated area with a mixture of tree types... similar to RPC where you can populate proxies based on a percentage.

 

I am using 3ds max 9 32-bit.

 

I have tried Vue 6 infinite, Groundwiz, and speed tree demos... and I am still not sold on any of the products...

 

I have done reading on Nat Fx and Onyx tree, and I am curious about how these perform on large scales...

 

Just by reading these forums it seems that many people are running into trouble with onyx tree... the site looks great but its always a different story when you dive into the program.

 

So the long and short... I need tons of trees in my scene without crashing max, and to get some decent quality render results. I have access to a large render farm so I am less concerned with render times and more concerned about the scene becoming so dense that max cant even handle it.

 

Thanks for any feedback and sorry for the long post.

[Claudio Branch]

Read this thread:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/29146-testing-creating-2d-background-trees-onyx.html

[moodo]

if you are working with max and vray i would recommend xfrog because of the advantages of the vray-proxies. have a look

http://www.form3d.de

and under portfolio and case studies you can find some examples to the topic

 

redards

[slanier]

claudio i am liking your approach to this very much... I think I understand how this effect is achieved... I have only messed with itoo's forest plugin only briefly.. Can the demo get me a good idea of what to expect from the full product?

 

My only concern is using Onyx... as I do not have access Vray which might make this method not practical...

Do you know if I can still achieve these Othrographic renders out of mental ray or SL renderer using Onyx or does it really only work when using Vray proxies?

 

Also is this really only effective for stills or does it work great in animations as well?

 

Thanks for your time

[Claudio Branch]

claudio i am liking your approach to this very much... I think I understand how this effect is achieved... I have only messed with itoo's forest plugin only briefly.. Can the demo get me a good idea of what to expect from the full product?

 

My only concern is using Onyx... as I do not have access Vray which might make this method not practical...

Do you know if I can still achieve these Othrographic renders out of mental ray or SL renderer using Onyx or does it really only work when using Vray proxies?

 

Also is this really only effective for stills or does it work great in animations as well?

 

Thanks for your time

 

The demo works well enough, but it does have some limitations. I believe one of it's limitations is that you can only assign one set of tree images as opposed to up to six with the full version. Also, I am not crazy about the quality of the tree images within their library. I prefer to make my own using Onyx.

 

You can make tree images from Onyx trees with MR, SL and V-Ray. MR has proxy capability now and with Scanline your render times will be through the roof. If you have a farm though, you could submit a few through it.

 

The approach I use works very well with renderings and animation...

[SgWRX]

forest pro is way expensive! just to get the ability to add different trees. i haven't done too much since that post but am working on a foliage test scene now. i'll see if i can get get something soon.

[SgWRX]

here's a quick tree line i just did since my previous post. i planted a tree that i had modified earlier in conifer, then i rendered the front view with a mr sun/sky against a black background (turned off the physical sky background). i used the random seed and rendered out 4 more. then i saved the renders as a png file with alpha. finally just created 5 planes with uvw mappings to fit the png file and then copied a bunch of times. the variation in color/brightness was playing around on each of the 5 materials, rgb output. this isn't as good as what others are achieving, but hey i'm still playing and learning. to me, there's a LOT to learn with onyx but once you start playing around with it you can slowly learn the routine to get similar results pretty quickly.