Recommended Vegetation Plugin for Max 2011/2012

[mkofmainchester]

Hello everyone,

 

I intend to invest into an vegetation plug-in, as I have to do some exterior work. I am currently looking at three competeing products: Onyx, GrowFX and AutoGrass.

 

I would be thankful if someone in the know would be kind enough to comment on following issues:

 

1. if I get Onyx or GrowFX is it sensible to get AutoGrass as well, or will this be doing a redundant job?

 

2. how does GrowFX currently compare to the Onyx Super Bundle?

As I understand GrowFX is cheaper, appears to have a better support and allows to animate growth, while the Onyx package produces slightly better models. Is there any more to it?

 

3. how stable are both packages with the aforementioned versions of MAX?

 

4 (Bonus question) I am also thinking about getting a scatter solution (mainly for use with vray proxies).

 

Which scatter would you recommend? Where do you see the main limitations of the scripts/plugins and which scatterer would you recommend (if I go for a commercial solution, I would be leaning towards Forest Pack as Vray and Multi Scatter seem to get more stick on the forums).

 

Thank you for your input.

 

Regards

 

mkfrommainchester

[beestee]

It sounds like you already have a good grasp on the current situation between onyx and growfx. Some points I might add:

• Onyx Super Bundle includes a lot of already built models that are good as starting points for creating your own plants. GrowFX does not compare in this regard as far as I know.
  
• Onyx includes tools to do wind animation. GrowFX does not yet have this.
  
• Exlevel is working to close the gap in these areas, but who knows when that will be realized.
  
• Onyx has not advanced much in quite some time, whereas GrowFX has been regularly improved over the past few years.
  

If you don't immediately need wind animation built in, and you don't mind generating your tree and plant library from scratch, then I would say go with GrowFX. Otherwise, go with Onyx.

 

Stability in Max isn't really much of a issue if you will probably be making proxies of the results.

 

AutoGrass probably fits in more with the scatter tools, since MultiScatter and ForestPro can both do grass when you feed them the geometry to do so (example: http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/04/vray-grass-tutorial-part-2/)

 

AutoGrass in my opinion is too limited to justify choosing it over the others (it only does grass), and the only development since it's release as far as I can tell has been for maintenance. You can't really go wrong with picking either MultiScatter or ForestPro I think. They both have strong development behind them. You should be able to find/get demo versions of each so you can see which suits your preferences.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I tried demos of the ones I could and had trouble with obscure UIs and stability. My figuring was that if I couldn't figure out how to make a little sapling on my own and the thing kept crashing before I could do much then it wasn't something I wanted. ymmv.

[beestee]

There is always Arbaro as well. Requires a little more effort to get the models into Max, but the simple interface and fact that it is free are some good reasons to give it a try.

[absolute3d]

I use Multiscatter plugin for scattering and it works so well

 

For the models, i use especially icube models, some evermotion too (only for first plane trees and bushes, not massive) and some HQ trees.

 

Cheers,

Thomas

[JohnW3D]

Good questions! much the same lines I am on. I talked my company in buying Vue + a bunch of rendernode licenses are great expense, and turns out it is utterly unstable, very clunky and in lots of ways a huge waste of time for animations (what I do 75% of the time). I can hardly stand to use it to be quite honest, beyond perhaps for water/clouds/pretty skies and times I need attractive infinite procedural terrains.

 

For my bread and butter trees, at least those in my medium-fore ground, I am thinking of Onyx now. I haven't looked much into the GrowFX side of things so I'd be interested in hearing more opinions myself I tend to work on medium scale exterior historical scenes that often involve parkland and so on.

 

I haven't ever tried to Scatter/VrayProxy a whole forest worth of stuff, lets say 100k trees and plants (10 different proxied models say). Would render times be so hit by this many proxies that I should just shut my face and use Vue? which in fairness, could throw me down a 100k forest without too much issue once you know how to avoid the 100000 different crash situations....

 

I am 24GB RAM, 8 cores, Quadro 3700.

Cheers

John

[Professor]

I purchased GrowFX and really like it. Main reasons for going with it for me were cost and UI. GrowFX being the better on both fronts. I can't comment much on Onyx, because never used it, but my research led me to go with GrowFX and I'm very happy with the decision. The UI is very clean and straightforward and their support has been fantastic. They bend over backwards to help you out, send examples and they do it in a very timely manner.

 

Not sure where the wind animation comment above is coming from, because you can animate all vegetation to simulate wind. Here is a simplistic youtube video showing the final effect

Maybe the comment was made above based on "how" you create the effect. You don't use Wind Force, its all done through animation and the Curve Editor. My recommendation: Buy GrowFX.

[JohnW3D]

I certainly prefer the idea that GrowFX / Forest pack etc are being more actively developed and are likely to be compatible and advance for time to come. Skeet, as a user of GrowFX, how do you respond to the criticism above that it doesn't come with a large prebuilt library of trees to use as base plants, and need to generate much from scratch? this seems like quite a bit point to me!

 

Cheers

John

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

G

For my bread and butter trees, at least those in my medium-fore ground, I am thinking of Onyx now.

 

Anything mid to foreground typically becomes composite work for me. So, I would recommend throwing a good 2d tree map library into the mix.

 

At least this is the case in my still image work flow.

[Professor]

I certainly prefer the idea that GrowFX / Forest pack etc are being more actively developed and are likely to be compatible and advance for time to come. Skeet, as a user of GrowFX, how do you respond to the criticism above that it doesn't come with a large prebuilt library of trees to use as base plants, and need to generate much from scratch? this seems like quite a bit point to me!

 

Cheers

John

 

I think the point about Onyx having a bigger pre-built library is true. Guess you have to decide how important that is to you. For me, the extra $400 cost wasn't worth it. Plus, since I am fairly new at the 3D gig, I like experimenting and building my own stuff and try and avoid the pre-built (for now anyways, that might change in the future). All in all, I'm very happy with GrowFX. Perhaps as the user base grows, more prebuilt vegetation will be made available over time.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

We never updated to the Super Bundle of Onyx, but the pre-builts that are included with Onyx look like cartoon trees. Which are fine in many cases, but they lack sophistication without a lot of tinkering.

[TJunkers]

I bought Vue 9 xStream and love it. It gives you the ability to do everything from grass to planets!

[JohnW3D]

I am using Vue 9.5 xStream but find it really unstable with max 2010 - I don't ever work within max with the plugin, only ever in the standalone because of the rampant instability of the plugin, which kind of defeats most of the point! It would be great, although I do almost exclusively animations and having to introduce the "texture filtering" to avoid flickering is less than useless (filtering just blurs your textures, which means extreme color changes to any leaf - it blends the real leaf color with the textures background color, normally white. Awful...).

 

I also find scene navigation awkward, and have issues with aspects of sculpting on terrains and the texturing process (multiple material painting with complicated collection of materials for instance is buggy as hell). Most of all it is just buggy software.

 

I will carry on using it but am not going to rely on it for too much or I will end up pulling my hair out.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

If I was going to select between GrowFX and Onyx, I would select GrowFX based on this article.

http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2011/05/04/digital-bark-and-sap-onyx-vs-growfx/#more-170

[Professor]

If I was going to select between GrowFX and Onyx, I would select GrowFX based on this article.

http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2011/05/04/digital-bark-and-sap-onyx-vs-growfx/#more-170

 

Great article Travis. Thanks for posting!