plants and trees in Maya!

[kdallons]

Hi everyone! I'm pretty new at Arch Viz and I'm having a horrible time finding(making) trees and plants. Converted paint fx can only get you so far and all of my research so far has only brought up stuff for max. Any tips?

[jinsley]

Not 100% sure without looking, but I think Gnomon offers some training with foliage in Maya... I would pop over to their site and check it out.

[thatch]

http://www.xfrog.com/

[jinsley]

http://www.xfrog.com/

 

yeah, or you could try onyx too... reasonably priced with a really fast learning curve...

[HamburgerTrain]

Onyx is great because the leaves are sky sensitive which is needed for realistic trees. But it is possible to good looking trees with PaintFX but the learning curve to get them looking good is insane.

 

I think PaintFX is best for grasses, bushes, stones, vines etc....For trees it's fastest and best to use Onyx via obj in my opinion.

[IllustratorMD]

Onyx is great because the leaves are sky sensitive which is needed for realistic trees. But it is possible to good looking trees with PaintFX but the learning curve to get them looking good is insane.

 

I think PaintFX is best for grasses, bushes, stones, vines etc....For trees it's fastest and best to use Onyx via obj in my opinion.

 

 

Onyx looks sweet..... mabe I am wrong, but isn't it just for 3D S max? we are talking about plants in maya, no?

 

any good tuts anyone has seen to help get paintfx trees/plants looking good I would love to see! thanks

[HamburgerTrain]

Onyx can directly plug into 3DS Max with the "TreeStorm" plugin I believe but Onyx itself can export as .obj, so it's fine to use with Maya...except you cannot tweak your trees as fast as TreeStorm but I'd recommend Onyx over Maya's PaintFX anyday.

 

It's possible but a lot of hassle getting nice trees in PaintFX compared to almost a one click solution that you get with Onyx.

[IllustratorMD]

Interesting! good to know that its is an option. thanks for the fast reply. I am looking into what kind of tweaking I need to do with the paint fx stuff to make them look better. I have seen some people say converting them to geometry might help, although it might slow down renders. if you have any ideas I would love to hear them. I am just a poor freelancer just starting out so I probably won't invest in any fancy plugins for some time.

[HamburgerTrain]

PaintFX is really a post process effect that is used with Maya Software renderer. When you convert PaintFX to geometry this enables other 3rd Party Renderers like mental ray and V-Ray to render PaintFX.

 

As for tips on making realistic foliage....it is hard and mostly requires a *lot* of tweaking but hopefully these tips from Duncan help:

 

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/duncan/farnsworth_house_render

 

Onyx is not that expensive for the BroadLeaf app. I think it's worth it than the time spent in Maya creating PaintFX foliage.

[bobaki]

Hi guys,

Maybe my suggestion is abit old-ish but using Sprites in maya to achieve the trees and foilage is the way to go..It does trick the camera but that is what 3D is for..to trick the audience or eye ...So my best bet would be PaintFX but if that doesnt work out for you then i would suggest Sprites..