Tips for large amounts of plantings?

[Chad Warner]

I have to do several views of an estate home, with literally acres of plantings including different shrubs, grasses, and flowers. Does anyone have any good techniques do to these types of plantings? I have tried forest pro, but haven't been overly excited about the results. I could post-process them in photoshop, but with several views, I would prefer to do it in Viz.

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

-Chad

[mbr]

I'd try a strategic combination of post PS, image maps (like marlin studios), models (like XFrogs), and maybe RPCs. If you do it well, you won't have much PS work.

 

Good luck.

[stinkyz]

Try Speedtree. Not too expensive. very fast. and pretty good quality.

[3dp]

i saw this and thought straight out forest pro and i'm surprised you have problems with it

i've used it since it first came out and not just for planting up images

what issues do you have with it?

if you are using only the shipping libraries then yes i'd agree

myself i spent a long time around four years ago making LOTS of plant libraries eg flowers with 50+ multisub entries in materials

i've got set so i can "drag and drop" very dense planting into a project in a short time (i even have scenes set up with plants trees crowds to go)

 

archvision rpc also have a foresting script i recall but then you need a second mortgage on buying the rpc that everyone else has got

 

i've used speedtree in other peoples offices before and that works but it needs a whole load more plants to be worked up

 

hope that helps a little

[bigcahunak]

I'd take MBR's advice, and perhaps even without the RPC, or just RPC in PS.

[Fermi Bertran]

Hi Chad,

 

Depending on the views, and the renderer.

 

For relatively Ground level views, Forest with bitmaped trees should do a great work.

For Eyebird lpoint of views (may be here the billgboarded bitmaps do not work so well) Gary Gresham's http://www.nsight3d.com/ trees may still do a good job, specially if you are using scanline renderer and shadowmapped lights.

For VRay, Sometimes 3d geometry trees (onyx) has worked well if keeping them instanced and telling so to the renderer (some 24 million poligons in the scene) but others have not :-(

 

Most likely you will need one approach for general views, and a different one for close ups...

 

Keep us updated

 

Fermí

[skana]

Have you tried the latest release of EASYnat v2.5, by Bionatics? They have just released it this week and it seems they have improved it over their previous versions...faster, better quality, and better optimized to create large areas of foliage...check it out : http://www.easynat.com

 

(It's compatible with all of the Autodesk 2005 family of products, as well as previous versions)

[Chad Warner]

I have not tried speed tree or easynat, though I like what I see with easynat. My biggest problem with forest is I have a hard time getting the shrubs to appear "anchored" to the ground....they always end up looking pasted on the image.

 

I will let you all know what I come up with.

 

Thanks!!

 

-Chad

[supernaching]

I would use trees images, you can find some in

http://www.alfanature.com

[Gnarly Cranium]

Whatever you try, be sure to test it in a few different scenarios, with different numbers of trees and different types of shadows. Remember that polycount isn't necessarily an indication of how well things will work-- for me, even the 2D easynat trees would crash max every chance they got. That might just be a quirk of my machine though, definitely give easynat and Speedtree a try. Xfrog looks great too.

 

Here's my experience with trying out different plants:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6326