natFX and Speed trees review

[Pierre-Felix Breton]

Hi Jeff,

 

great review, as always.

 

one thing I would like to know about both trees solutions is the way the handle radiosity renderings and material maps access:

 

some quick questions,

 

- do they let you edit the materials yourself or they provide encapsulated maps/materials like RPC objects?

 

- do they work well with radiosity? (solution invalidation after rendering, exposure control, etc..)

 

have a nice day,

[Craig Ramsay]

Yeah i'd like to know this aswell! I wouldn't buy either of them if I couldn't edit the maps.

 

Imagine you had a night-time scene with trees in it but the tree's were looking like they were lit by daylight crap!

 

Hope this isn't the case

 

Cheers

 

Craig

[Jeff Mottle]

Thanks Pierre-Felix,

 

Well there was bound to be one thing I forgot.

natFX has not been tested with radiosity, but I was told that there shouldn't be any issues. SpeedTree works with Radiosity, but as as I mentioned in the review, had issues with Brazil. This came from Digimation, not me, as I don't currently have brazil. I ran out of time and was not able to fully test them with Radiosty, but all indications from both developers are that they do work.

 

In regards to materials, Speedtree works from user supplied bitmaps. You just chose one or several (depending upon the element) and assign it to a trunk, leaves etc. Speed Tree does the hard work of placing the bitmps in billboard groupings around the tree, or mapping it to the geometry (branches, trunks etc).

With natFX, all material are generated procedurally, so until the tree is created there are no textures. One the tree has beeen created actual bitmaps are written to your harddrive. They are derived from Multi-Sub materials and built-in scanned bitmaps. You can use the Texture editor to reasssign already generated bitmaps to other trees, or use a texture editor to edit the bitmaps manually, but for the app's purpose is reall not to do this, as the are supposidly correct already.

 

Originally posted by Pierre-Felix Breton:

Hi Jeff,

 

great review, as always.

 

one thing I would like to know about both trees solutions is the way the handle radiosity renderings and material maps access:

 

some quick questions,

 

- do they let you edit the materials yourself or they provide encapsulated maps/materials like RPC objects?

 

- do they work well with radiosity? (solution invalidation after rendering, exposure control, etc..)

 

have a nice day,