Vegetation once again

[Andrew1]

Sorry if that had been asked in the past,

just getting back into productive life after a short break....

 

I am trying to create a small library of proxy trees and shrubs, I am using a few xfrog trees,

I noticed they use opacity maps for leaves etc, now the render time is quite high even after I exclude my objects / proxy trees from generating GI,

Is there a better solution ??? I am aware of ONYX however its been a while and I am pretty much at testing stage over again...

Can anyone suggest a solution..., I want my plants/trees to look realistic...,

could there be a trick in generating fast opacity renders ,maybe there is something I am unaware of.

 

thanks for any help,

 

Andrew

[Kawzy]

From my experience, which is obviously just an opinion, when you make a proxy of a tree with opacity maps, it's true that it takes a little more time to render. However, I did some tests a little while back when we were starting to use ONYX, debating on if we should replace opacity mapped leaves with geometry based. Granted, I'm going off of memory, but the render speed wasn't really a major killer just using opacity maps, and it saved the time of changing the leaves to higher quality geometry than what comes out of ONYX. (Up close, we weren't fully satisfied with the leaves straight from ONYX).

Now, even though you're probably thinking I'm crazy and that the time is a critical gain, to use an example, I recently just finished rendering a HEAVILY populated landscape scenario, even with proxies it was over 5 million polygons. Practically every plant used opacity maps on the leaves, with the exception of some palms that were 3d as well. At 3200 x 4000, the rendering took in the neighborhood of one hour and twenty minutes. To me, it was fully acceptable, considering there were about fifteen to twentry variations of shrubs, it would have taken I would estimate a minimum of an hour a piece to create and populate higher quality leaf geometry. That's a savings of at least 15 man hours. To us, it wasn't worth it. Especially since using two-sided materials in vray with translucency creates beautiful leaves anyways.

[Andrew1]

thanks Kawzy,

 

I just have one more question, in that rendering that took only one hour did you unassign all your trees from generating gi ???

and also specs of your system or perhaps this was rendered with a farm...

I like the quality of the renders using xfrog models, but now if i have to populate a scene with example 30 + trees , would you go xfrof or onyx ?

 

thanks

[Kawzy]

Truthfully, I almost always do exclude them from generating gi. But I just opened the file to double check, and it appears that I was in too much of a hurry and forgot to exclude them. So I guess that's even better for the arguement. I agree xfrog trees look awesome. Unfortunately, they don't have a vast enough library to keep up with our landscape architects, whom I swear choose different foliage every project that we don't yet have in our library just to test us. Because of this, I use onyx a great deal and with opacity mapped leaves, they can look pretty sweet as well. It isn't the BEST rendering of landscape every, but here are some jpegs from the scene and I think they turned out pretty nice. The only xfrog plant is the small, fan leafed ferns along the sidewalk. And I think the rendering was pretty close to 1:30, maybe even 1:45. We have a small farm, but we were having some network issues a few weeks back, so I just rendered it out on my machine to ensure it was done.

 

As far as my macine, it's a fairly new upgrade for me. I believe it's basically as follows

i7 920 @2.67 GHz

12 GB Ram

Nvidia Quadro FX 3450

[Kawzy]

So, I guess in short, I'd probably end up using Onyx just because of the need for certain planting and you can have control over polygon count. Plus if you create a seperate file for each tree and use treestorm, you can quickly generate variations and save them off as proxies to merge into another file. That's how we do it here anyway. Both work nicely however. Sorry I didn't include that in my previous post.

[aristocratic3d]

Hey josh,

I am using " NVDA Geforce 9500 GT". May I know how much is the difference between "Nvidia Quadro FX 3450" and " NVDA Geforce 9500 GT"?

 

I am really an stupid about these graphic properties .

 

Thanks in advance man.

[Kawzy]

I'm far from an expert on video cards and don't know much about them. My video card is actually fairly old, and it's pretty much the only thing that the tech guys keep re-using instead of purchasing a new one because from what I understand it's still a pretty good card. Again, I know little to nothing, and I'm sure there are thousands of users on here that could give you all the info you'd ever need. From what I understand though, the 3450 has a 256 bit memory bus (64x4) and the 9500 has a 128 bit (64x2).

Now there's a good chance I'll get laughed at and could be entirely wrong, but that means the 3450 can handle twice the 3d data, making it more efficient. I believe the 3450 also has a larger memory bandwith, which means it can handle larger textures and anti-aliasing better. Again, I wouldn't take that as fact until someone more knowledgable about video cards could add to that, or tell me that I'm way off.

[aristocratic3d]

thanks man. I will post a new thread . hopefully someone will be able to help me.

Thanks again for your reply again.

[divanovic]

So, I guess in short, I'd probably end up using Onyx just because of the need for certain planting and you can have control over polygon count. Plus if you create a seperate file for each tree and use treestorm, you can quickly generate variations and save them off as proxies to merge into another file. That's how we do it here anyway. Both work nicely however. Sorry I didn't include that in my previous post.

 

hello,

can onyx export as regular object format, like .obj or .3ds or similar, or is it only as vray/mr proxies? And how much time do one need to make a decent looking tree, for example an oak or similar, and then make 10 variations of it?

 

not a noob, but haven't touched onyx ever.

cheers

dejan

[aristocratic3d]

Hey, you can export onyx trees as 3ds obj and some other 3D format. it takes a few min to create a decent tree.

hello,

can onyx export as regular object format, like .obj or .3ds or similar, or is it only as vray/mr proxies? And how much time do one need to make a decent looking tree, for example an oak or similar, and then make 10 variations of it?

 

not a noob, but haven't touched onyx ever.

cheers

dejan

[Kawzy]

And to add to that comment, it's also extremely easy to create variations of a tree once you have one you like. All you have to do is click the "random seed" button in Onyx and it takes the parameters you've given onyx for your tree type and randomizes the output. This maintains the qualities you've selected, just creates different configurations as you might find in nature. Of course, the speed at which you can create the tree you want is based on your experience with the program and how closely you want to match the subject. I've had some real buggers that I've had to create, but I'd say start to finish, from modeling the tree and taking it into max to apply textures and make it ready to populate a scene, you're looking at no more than 20-30 minutes. Less if you don't get crazy with the materials and even less if your tree is simple.

[divanovic]

thanks for both answers guys, sorry I went a bit off topic,

 

cheers