Administrators Jeff Mottle Posted August 8, 2002 Administrators Share Posted August 8, 2002 Just wanted to know if there are many people out there that are using the MAX/VIZ Bionatics plugin? Yes I am a reseller , but I had a chance to play with it earlier today and was very impressed with what it could do. I recently had a conract job where the client literally wanted to have me shape the crowns of the trees. As I used RPCs it wasn't an option, but I wish I had experimented with this plugin earlier. It kind of works like RPCs, but creates the truck, branch and leaf bitmaps proceduallly on the fly, based upon the parameters you set. You then have the ability convert the bitmap inoformation to polys it you want to edit the trees futher. I was also quite surprised that the poly counts were so low. A 10 year old tree had about 250 faces and a 25 year old tree had about 1200 faces. Anyway i'm curious to know if anybody has used them in production. The guys at Bionatics siad that they were very popular with architects, but I had never heard anybody mentino using them. You can check them out here, they have a free demo: http://www.bionatics.com If you have problems accessing their site properly(I did) you can view the PDF info sheet in the eStore. (Look under models) http://www.cgarchitect.com/shop/shopdisplaycategories.asp [ August 08, 2002, 03:35 PM: Message edited by: Jeff Mottle ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 Hi Jeff, I know Bionat/fx for quite some time now. I've been in touch with their office in Paris several times for support on the demo.Unfortunately I was not able to test it yet, because it simple won't run under max3.1. A damn pitty! (But maybe we should have updated our max - we got our reasons not to) rgds nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Buchhofer Posted August 8, 2002 Share Posted August 8, 2002 I tried the demo last year when I brought home a cd from Siggraph.. I found it to be very impressive, but the price was a bit out of our range (Also due to the fact that we had just bought into the RPC option right before.) The support folks seemed fairly responsive, even to the point of several overseas phone conversations. The downside I saw was the Price of ~$500 for 10 plants. that and their website is about as intuitive as assembly level programming [ August 08, 2002, 08:13 PM: Message edited by: Dave Buchhofer ] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plastic Posted August 9, 2002 Share Posted August 9, 2002 >> their website is about as intuitive as assembly level programming. thats right. perfect example of how to not make a webpage. i'm not familar with this plugin, and i wasn't able to find any larger-than-microscopic pictures on their site.usually i don't like procedural plants, because they always look cartoonish and take ages to render.speed tree is a very interesting approach, its an impressing plugin, except that it only works with us-systems (it doesn't even run when the comma symbol is ',' instead of '.'this is the most stupid restriction i ever saw with software.besides, it is far out of my budget, considering that it doesn't even come with good textures. btw. i did my own tree plugin, it now supports look-at-camera, check my announcement in the script section if you're interested... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted August 9, 2002 Share Posted August 9, 2002 Hi all, Prices are indeed too high. Looking forward to your script-post Marc rgds nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kimblarsen Posted August 30, 2002 Share Posted August 30, 2002 Hi Jeff, We got the natFX plugin for MAX before summer and we have just started using it. It works very well for producing outdoor scenes (which we are currently not doing too many of). My only complaints are the lack of a sufficient variety of European and Nordic trees and plants. Also they have yet to produce the kind of plants and small trees which we need for interior visualisation (which we do a lot of). Cheers,Kim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest saturnfive Posted September 6, 2002 Share Posted September 6, 2002 Looks like a great idea: combine the best of 2d and 3d plants. The free trees at x-frog are very good, but sooo high poly (750,000) ulp! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vizwhiz Posted September 6, 2002 Share Posted September 6, 2002 hi There. Jeff, (get some Sleep!, dude) say Check This out: Main Index: http://www.viz2000.com/htm0/0000-linkquik.html SITE TREE MAPS: http://www.viz2000.com/htm0/03H3-QUIK-SITE-TREE-MAPS.html SITE TREE OBJS: http://www.viz2000.com/htm0/03H4-QUIK-SITE-TREE-OBJS.html SITE TREE PLUG: http://www.viz2000.com/htm0/03H5-QUIK-SITE-TREE-PLUG.html **** i am (slowly) creating an On-Line Object-Oriented DataBase for MAX/VIZ users, Textures, 3d MOdels, and etc useful (hopefully) Information. if anyone has a useful link (that isnt already Linked or Listed) please let me know. (There has got to be some good use for This Obsessive/Compulsive 3d Addiction) Thanks Randywww.viz2000.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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