SpeedTree Studio Demo - rambling on a bit

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Executive Summary : If you're looking for some tree software, check this out.

 

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Been playing with the SpeedTree Studio demo for a little bit. Enough to get a feel, I think. I'm impressed.

 

The overall feel is slick and fairly intuitive. I only had it crash once. I think it recovered my in progress tree, but I forget. One of the other big names in trees I tested and I couldn't get the thing to run long enough to make a single sapling.

 

I already have my money in to Onyx but if another job came up with a large enough ticket, I'd sore consider springing for ST.

 

The help has been helpful. Better than some, worse than others. It hasn't pissed me off yet.

 

I think branches are bent by means of external forces rather than a property of their growth. I think I like how it integrates into the tree design with Onyx better, but I can see the ST approach allowing more power.

 

The use of multi-node spline curves to control various aspects of the model (chance of a brance, amount of bend force) based on length of element or distance from root or... seems nicely done. I couldn't igure out how to make

the left side of the tree orange though ;-). Inclusion of a list of standard curves is a nice touch.

 

Speaking of which, multiple leaf type with weights and curves controlling appearance and distribution worked very nicely.

 

The realtime display in app is nice.

 

I have a gripe with the palette which shows extensive tooltip info for the hovered control : it's nice that y'all put a scrollbar on the thing to allow it to contain more info than it can show, but in order to scroll it, I have to unhover the thing you're telling me about. That's not working for me.

 

There are a ton of things I don't know how to do yet and the 10 day demo will die before I learn but I suspect that many of those things can be done.

 

My other gripe is with the demo export. Exported trees are decimated. Enough of the trunk and branches remain to give a sense that "yeah, I guess it works" but it looks like leaves don't come through. So actually testing the actual product in something like an actual production situation - no. I have found a complete tree in the samples directory. Right this second it is rendering black...bad absolute path to bitmaps. ... Now I'm having trouble with how they set up transparency ... It's my classic problem with not being able to just drop an image with an alpha where it needs to go and have it work right. I'm always making a copy and setting rgb to alpha gray. I don't know if that's me or what. There are a number of options so I haven't exhausted the import system. Now with proper materials my tree is rendering OK.

 

This tree does not have cleverly facing panels, it just has threeway groups. So I don't know what the real deal is.

 

Watching a third party tut on the toobz I see that there are scripts to aid movement between max and ST. It looks like the script does take care of the one thing that concerned me most...

 

The one thing that impresses me most is the use of nice big billboards for leaf distribution. In ST itself they have some camera following behaviour that seems a little smarter than just plain look at. Maybe not. Can't say. It looks like this behaviour is carried over to Max if imported with the provided scripts. I have been experimenting with Onyx and scaling up single leaves to act as leaf groups just to help with poly count. I haven't succeded there yet.

 

And now I don't have to.

 

With leaves as billboards there is a legitimate concern for obvious repetition showing up in final trees. That doesn't seem to be as much an issue as I would have expected. Maybe it's just because enough leaves look like noise and the textures are reoriented enough. Use multiple textures and you're even safer.

 

Tree is rendering slowly which I'm betting has something to do with all the fine cutout mapping.

 

In a very unscientific test, an Onyx tree with 1,200,000 polys with individual little leaves and no cutout mapping is rendering much faster than a 7,000 poly SpeedTree with leaf clusters and cutout mapping.

 

And turning off the cutouts speed this up nicely. Looks like broccoli made out of fluorite crystals, but enh. Looks pretty good that way from a distance but is maybe a little too self shadowing.

 

But it looks like ST can do individual leaves, or groups with interesting geometry whereas Onyx... you get individual leaves or nothing.

 

There are a few templates that Studio Demo ships with. They are nice for getting a start. A broader library would be nice, but it looks like Studio users pay per plant. But then, none of the plants I need are available for Onyx and I end up building them anyway. Hey, bright side - building your own veg makes you learn the software better.

 

Onyx always bothered me in that random instances tended to look similar. Especially the ones that always had the same quirk branch. "Oops, there's a stupid branch at ground level. Well I change the random and... it will still be there." ST is getting more variety per species just by clicking the random button. I like that.

 

Onyx seems dedicated to creating trees that look like happy trees spawned by the rules of nature and untouched by human hands. ST has some geometry constraint options. I tried to make a tightly trimmed bush like is all over for landscaping in Phoenix. Have not yet despaired but am worried.

 

ST has realtime live wind in its editor. I don't know how/if this exports. Can animation be embedded in an FBX?

 

If so, then there's probably the answer for that. ... Oh hey, this demo tree is shaking in the breeze. Guess that's possible.

 

Generated branches can be shifted, rotated and scaled on the tree if they don't come out quite where you would like.

 

The hand drawn option is very slick for getting just the tree you need or just adding a branch in just the right way.

 

The node based editor is straightforward and intuitive enough. Oops, second crash. Maybe I'm designing my trees wrong, but I would like to be able to instance a leaf node across multiple branch nodes. It seems to only copy them which is a shame.

 

The Studio Demo shipped with some world building material and there are world building masks available in the main app, but I thought Studio had no World Building. So I'm clueless on that. Let me fire this up... (the golf course video is sweeeeet)... OK, it loaded up a golf course in the Studio Eval. So I guess I need to go reread. If it really is there and really works, that increases the buyability. Making changes to distribution frequencies is slow. Probably my 2 Gig 32bit machine from 2005.

 

Yeah, http://www.speedtree.com/apps/ clearly says no World Building in Studio. Color me clueless.

 

Anyway, that's enough of that.

 

I think I like it. The price tag is much nicer than the gaming/movie versions.

Edited August 15, 2011 by Peter M. Gruhn
copy/paste from notepad fubar