Landscaping Problems

[videep]

Hello Everyone,

 

I recently have been working on landscaping, which is a simple one where i have to pt trees and bushes and plants, etc... I made row houses and now I would like to show some park area and would like to put trees.

 

Can you suggest what I need to do as I am using 3ds max and vray and I need to put plants. By plants, I mean not 10-20 but about 50-60 plants, trees bushes etc..

 

I would not be buying rpc's so I need some help as to whats the next best alternative...

 

I have seen that Evermotion's trees have a high poly count...

 

I need suggestions as to whats the best I can do ... If i need to use evermotion's trees then some suggestions from you would also be helpful.

 

Thank You

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I don't know how many poly's the Evermotion stuff has, but what do you consider high poly? ...for our 3d foliage models we typically use Onyx, and I target the number of poly's in the tree models anywhere from 400,000 to 1.3 million. Once converted to proxies a decent system can handle these without a problem.

 

I will say however, if you are going to do any serious landscaping work using vegetation models it is almost a must to be using a 64bit system with a bare min of 6gb of ram. Anything less than that and you will need to start doing work arounds, rendering separate passes, etc...

 

Also, don't balk at the notion of using a very simply 3d tree to cast shadows on the ground (trees would not be visible to camera,) and then compositing 2d images in skillfully Photoshop. This often gives a much more sohpisticated look to the image. If low polycount trees are used in a 'realistic' inspired image, then the image will probably have a cartoonish, or odd feel to it.

 

As you said, avoid the RPC's, but their high res trees images are actually fairly good. But even then, I would only recommend them being used in Photoshop, and not directly in 3dsMax.

[videep]

Hey Travis, Thankyou for replying,

Will give a try to use proxies and onyx too.. Well I have an I5 with 4gigs of ram and 1 gig of graphics card and xp x64.

So I guess it wont create a problem. Is it also advisable to use onyx for animations??

[Peter M. Gruhn]

http://www.hwb.com/gruhn/3d/op/final/

 

I was unable to do anything useful with in model veg so I rendered a bunch of Onyx stuff individually, made up palettes to grab from and comped in PShop. There's clearly issues, but I'm happy for a first go.

[Itoosoft]

From our website (www.itoosoft.com) you can download some free samples of HQ Plants, and use them with Forest Pack Lite, or as stand-alone proxies. With your computer and using VRay, there are not problems to render some thousands of high poly trees and get excellent results.

 

If you need assistance creating the scene, i will be pleased to help you (here or in the Itoo Software forum).

[videep]

@ Peter : Well thats absolutely what I do for stills... The best way to do landscaping.

 

@ Carlos : Well I actually dont want to spend money on plugins as every plugin that i see is nothing less than $300-$400, so I am actually looking out for some other solutions. I would be downloading som free smaples though and if any help needed, Would definitely contact you. Thankyou.

[Itoosoft]

Hi videep,

 

I understand. I suggested Forest Lite because it's free, and you can use it in your commercial projects. The main limitation of this version is that it only works in flat surfaces, that usually is not a problem if you are creating park areas.