Low poly tree library for animation work.

[hopkins9999]

Hello,

I'm working on a project which needs a 2 minute animation and lots of trees in the foreground and background. I'll be using billboards in the background, but I'll be moving close to a lot of them in the foreground, so can anyone recommend a tree library where the polygon count isn't too excessive - I'm thinking under 30k each or so but I'm open to advice.

thanks

[Matt McDonald]

What rendering engine are you going to use and how much memory do your rendering machines have? I tend to believe that using high poly proxies with MR or VR is no big deal in terms of render time or memory useage. Short of that, I suppose that you could also use any library you like, hit it with the optimize modifier (and isn't there now a "pro-optimizer" built into max) and be pretty successful. Even better if you create your own high poly & low poly proxies.

 

What I find to have a bigger impact on render time is the bitmap blurring on the leaf opacity map. Setting the blurring to .01 will lower your render times dramatically no matter what rendering engine you use.

[hopkins9999]

Thanks for the help. I'll be using mental ray and have 8gb memory, only 1 machine though! I was contemplating just modelling some low poly trees but I thought that surely there exists in the market intermediate poly trees for animation work. It seems a huge gap between 300,000- 1million polys typical to 1 (for billboard). Anyway, I'll definitely look at optimising existing trees and see how I go.

[TSuess]

Matt is right. If you use Proxies you don't need to freak out too much about your poly count on the trees.

[Matt McDonald]

I'll chime in just a bit more because I felt like I mostly offered advice but didn't really answer your question.

 

With Onyx trees it is pretty easy to create versions of your trees at different poly counts so that would be my first suggestion if you are really worried about it. You'll still want to make them proxies though.

 

xFrog ships most of their libraries with billboard images for use in the background but xFrog trees have a pretty high poly count.

 

There is also a nifty script which helps you to make your own billboards.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/billboard-generator

With this guy you can have your high poly foreground trees and then billboards for the background trees.

 

I still contend that you don't have to be too worried about it but now you probably have all the info you need to make your own decisions.

[hopkins9999]

Thanks both for the advice. I'm still relatively new to this field so it's useful to get the input. I've just bought multiscatter so I'll get down to some serious testing with both low and high poly trees to see how it works out.

cheers

[MBetke]

Hi I guess I'm a bit late with this one but you may look at my shop at http://shop.pure3d.de for low-poly vegetation.

Some Viz companies already bought some of the models and were positive about the results concerning render times and quality.

 

I use the vegetation in my own real-time visualizations too and it works well.