XFROG to vray proxy

[Andrew1]

hey guys and gals,

 

I am sorry if that had been already answered I just spent 2 hours using search option and can't find what I'm after,

I was wondering If I could aquire some help here into converting

an xfrog plant to a vray proxy maintaining the plant mapping in place.,

could someone explain in bullets the process , I read something about

all the maps have to be fit into subobject material...

in the mean time the boss is out lol so I am gonna experiment a bit on my own, any help would be appreciated.

 

thanks.

[Dave Buchhofer]

two ways are saving out of the Xfrog standalone app as an obj, or importing the XFR into max directly (The problem here is that they dont have an importer for newer versions of max.)

 

i converted all of mine long ago and occasionally add a custom one, but i bought the library before they started shipping with max versions on the disks

[Andrew1]

Thanx Dave for the reply,

 

I am playing with the free xfrog samples from autodesk website,

I am just wondering about the vray proxy process and I think I already got it going, I am just wondering how people deal with the mapping subject, I noticed the vray proxy will hold the map id's but won't hold the actual texture, what I did I applied a multisubobject map to one tree saved it with the saved map path nd then I created vray proxy, what I did next is import my .max textured tree,imported the vray proxy tree and used the multisubobject material from the .max tree onto the proxy tree then I deleted the .max tree and instanced the vray proxy tree, how ever I've noticed that the render time is a killer, just rendering 4 trees is a pain...,

is it because of the opacity maps ???

After test rendering I am almost ready to give up on xfrog, I am not using much of trees as most of my designs consist of interior and product design, however I have been getting a few exterior projects and I think its time to spend some money on some ready made trees,

just wondering what package to buy, checking onyx vs xfrog.

All my projects are rendered with vray so vray proxy is what I have in mind for large quantities of trees.

any other thoughts guys ??,

 

thanks.

[Andrew1]

Thanks Alex for your reply,

I operate on a quad core 2.8 ghz comp, and I still find the xfrog trees render a long time I think thats due to the opacity maps,

I was thinking to maybe put a few xfrog trees in a close up and the rest real geometry trees turned to vray proxy.

Could someone on here describe their solution how they manage scenes with lots of trees ??

Just wondering about a good all around solution...

 

Thanks.

[Dave Buchhofer]

they're not too bad once you convert them and tweak a few small settings:

 

Convert them to vraymaterials,

use the opacity map slot

set filtering to none

 

and prefer to use DMC image sampling, and they then become pretty usable

 

http://buchhofer.com/upload/files/Scripts/XfrogMaterialsTo_VrayMTLs.ms

and heres a little script for it, since manually doing that for multi subs is a major downer

[cbwieczorek]

Thanks Alex for your reply,

I operate on a quad core 2.8 ghz comp, and I still find the xfrog trees render a long time I think thats due to the opacity maps,

I was thinking to maybe put a few xfrog trees in a close up and the rest real geometry trees turned to vray proxy.

Could someone on here describe their solution how they manage scenes with lots of trees ??

Just wondering about a good all around solution...

 

Thanks.

 

Andrew, did you have any issue with the materials not showing in the material editor? When I open the max file the tree is textured but and renders correctly but there are no materials in the editor for me to create a multi-sub-object to apply to the mr proxy.

 

C