Speed Tree

[Devin Johnston]

Does anyone out there use Speed Tree?

[Jeff Mottle]

Yup I've used it. What did you want to know about it? The only thing I don't like about SpeedTree is the fuzzy white halo that you typically get around the trees when you are any distance away from the tree. If you show me a CG image with trees I can 9 times out of 10 tell you whether of not it was done in SpeedTree. I've been using Onyx Trees lately.

[ShaunDon]

We use Speed Tree as well -- just upgraded to v3 and we're producing an animation with it now. I haven't seen the halo effect Jeff mentioned, but then again I've only used them myself on one other project. As a product, the libraries are spectacular up close, good at medium distance, but they look far too illustrative for me the further out you get. I think RPCs, if you color correct them in post, look better at a distance -- but they have their own world of problems, and my penchant for at least one crane/helicopter camera pass per animation really makes it hard to pull off an RPC landscape.

 

But I just never learn to keep my feet on the ground. ;-)

 

Shaun

[Sawyer]

I use and I have some problems with it. I runs fine but I think it gives a lower quality tree than what is out there. Also it creates uneditable geometry. Often this is not a big deal but if you have a tree close to a house you can only adjust the overall size you cannot remove a branch that is hitting a building.

 

It is really easy to use and I love it for aerials and background trees.

 

One bug I know of is the leaf faces do not rotate or match a moving camera. I think thats a biggie

[Devin Johnston]

Well I've been using RPC's forever and we needed another option for creating enough trees to give that jungle like effect. Speed Tree looked like a good option but I'm having some trouble with it in my animation. The trees look like there vibrating, I haven’t done anything with the wind option so I don't have any idea what's causing it. I've talked to tech support but they don't have any idea either. I've been rendering my animation over my network and I think that has something to do with it but I'm not sure. Have any of you had experience with rendering animations with it over your networks? If you have, how did you set it up? We copied all the files directly into the Max folders, we didn't go through the regular install, I'm not sure if this caused the problem.

[Eric]

I used speedtree with Viz for quite some time. However, I bought my digital camera just over a year ago, and every since then I have been trying to use photos of landscape elements to add to my renderings. There are a couple of renderings on this link that have speetree plants.

 

http://adcad.blogspot.com

 

"Abuelo's Prototype" - solid Speedtree

 

"Chapel Hill Office Park" - Combination Photos in foreground, Speedtree around the building, and RPC in the background

 

My biggest problem with Speedtree is that none of the standard trees were really suited for architectural renderings. Forests? No problem. Though, as mentioned above, if you want a true manicured landscape, you have to create or edit the libraries trees, which is no simple task to get decent looking results (with decent rendering times).

[Eric]

Oh, I've never used the speedtree plugin for animations. The plants and trees aren't exactly resource friendly. I just ended up using RPC trees, and photos mapped onto a plane with alpha channels for opacity. I don't have the cpu resources to handle much more than that.

[ShaunDon]

Hey Maxer --

 

This is the first time we've used speed tree for animations, and we've just discovered exactly the kind of vibrating you're describing... and I'm mad as hell. It's the freakin' brand new version of the plugin!

 

I'll post if I find a solution, but we're less than 24 hours from a deadline. Figures.

 

Shaun

[ChrisE]

I've done animation with version 2 and found it ok after working out a few problems that were creating a lot of headacks

 

Jeff the problem with the white ghosting i believe is with the image size of the leaves being too big. you need to lower the res on them.

 

The other problem mentioned about the leaves not facing the camera is becouse when the trees are instanced all the trees follow which ever camera is use on the main tree.

 

I didn't come up against any vibrating but then i was willing to try and use wind on my first animation with them

[ShaunDon]

Chris --

 

Can I assume that you rendered your animation frames through backburner?

 

Unfortunately we're also using RPCs to flesh out the landscape. I'd love to use the wind function, but with static RPCs in the mix it would kinda destroy the illusion. I guess we should have gone whole-hog Speed Tree on this.

 

Shaun

[ChrisE]

yeah I rendered it all out through backburner. I also rendered out the animation in layers and had the speed trees rendering out by themselves. I used bitmaps for some background trees and for the gardens. I haven't used the RPC people/trees but I have been looking at some so if there are problems between the two I'd like the hear it.

 

I found it could get a bit painful using large amounts of them so i would suggest just using them for the trees close to the camera.

[Devin Johnston]

Well I've been in touch with Digamation a lot over the past few days, it turns out that there is a major bug in Speed Tree 3. I've talked with their tech support and they have no idea how to fix the vibrating problem, so they have passed it along to who ever fixes their bug problems. They can't tell me when they will get the problem fixed, only that they will fix it. What I don't understand is how they can release a new upgrade to a plug-in and not test it. I mean if you’re doing animation chances are that you’re using a render farm of some size, just makes since to check and see if your plug-in works over a networked farm. Don't even think of trying to return your software, they told me that the reason they have a 30 day free trial is so that you can test it out with your system and see if it works OK. Funny thing is I never read that anywhere when I was purchasing the software! The thing that really irritates me is I called their sales office before I bought the software to make sure it worked with Max 6 and it supported Final Render and they never said a word about a bug, now there telling me that they have had several of the same complaints. Guess what....there still selling it on their web site!

[ShaunDon]

Great. I've been talking on the phone with the VP of IDV Software, he sent me a script to resets the wind controls to zero. I haven't had a chance to test it in render, but I'm skeptical -- wind controls have to be set to zero when you create the objects, so...

 

If you wanna give it a try, I've attached it as a text file. Rename it to an INI file, then load it in the wind control panel of one object, then hit apply to visible.

 

We're pretty pissed here too. Luckily we're compositing the landscaping in, so we don't have to re-render our whole animation... but our deadline is tonight, and there's not even enough time to re-render anything even if we knew this script did the job.

 

Shaun

[ShaunDon]

Sorry Chris, didn't see your post. The two work well together -- we just had to steer clear of the wind controls since RPC are static images, so wind kinda ruins the illusion. I'll try to remember to post some stills from the animation when it's all over... I think we were able to pull off some nice landscaping in parts using the combination.

 

Guess we've learned the valuable lesson of thoroughly testing plugins before implementing them in projects. More overhead. And no matter how ruggedly you test, it always seems that when the weight of a real project is on top of something, it busts at the seams.

 

Shaun

[Devin Johnston]

ShaunDon, I feel for you man, I had to go ahead and use the Speed Trees in my animation and those things were all over the map. I don't think that script is going to help because I thought of that as well when I was doing some testing and I set all the wind controls to zero and turned anything off that said wind and it didn't really help. I can't believe you were able to talk to the VP over there, I talked to some sales guy for about 20 minutes before I could convince him that I was dealing with a bug and not an operator problem.

I've also learned a good lesson, but like you said even if you do test the product they often don't enable all of the features until you buy the full version. By that time you've already purchased the thing and your stuck with it. Let me know how your animation turns out and if I hear anything else from them I'll let you know.

[Diver]

I haven't used it... heard mixed reviews though.

good luck

[ShaunDon]

Maxer --

 

Give that script a try as soon as you can. I applied it to one scene that had a lot of glitches to it and rendered it through backburner on two of our frame servers and it worked. That doesn't rule out a configuration issue in any of our three other machines -- I'm setting up now to re-render all passes starting tonight with all the machines tied together, and that'll tell me for sure. But if you're getting the same kinda glitch, hopefully we didn't just set it up the same wrong way one a couple of our machines. I'd doubt that.

 

I'll post my results in the morning, and if it works I'll give IDV a call and let them know they have the solution.

 

Good luck!

 

Shaun

[Devin Johnston]

That's great news Shaun, I have to say that I'm surprised that it worked but I'm not going to complain! Please let me know if you had success with your farm rendering, I'm going to have to give it a shot and see if it works.

 

I checked out your web site, I have to say nice work! How many people do you have working on those projects?

[ShaunDon]

Morning! All my tests rendered perfectly on all our machines last night, so whatever the glitch was, that resolved it. If you look at the script, it nulls a lot of values that you don't have control of in the actual plugin panel -- why those values aren't set to zero to begin with is still beyond me. We had to ship our animation with wigged-out landscaping yesterday as our client had a presentation this morning. That's disappointing, but given how last-minute we were trying to put this thing together I'm amazed that a buggy plugin was our only problem. And at least I was able to give it to them with the knowledge that we resolved the problem and were already correcting the animation.

 

We're a small, new firm here in New Hampshire still trying to carve out a market for ourselves. The website's great since it masks the fact that we are a very small firm -- we have three of us in-house and a network of local contractors that we pull in for additional modeling and animation work. We'd like to hire on more people, at least in the new year, but it's a tough part of the country to find qualified people who won't need months of training to do the work!

 

Good luck, man. Glad this looks to be under control.

 

Shaun

[ShaunDon]

Hey guys. I've posted some still frames of our animation so you can take a look. Like I said, we used both RPC and SpeedTree to flesh out the landscape, but we're still a little underwhelmed by the result. If anyone has any ideas for other landscaping methods, preferably geometry based and even animatable if possible, I'm all ears... We're sitting down today to review the final and discuss possible options for the future.

 

Personally I like the SpeedTrees a lot more than I thought I would. Definitely you can see the RPCs are just plain dead, whereas the ST objects take on lighting from the scene. They do look pretty illustrative, especially from a distance, but it's kinda cool. We were severely rushed on this job -- I built the environment and did the lighting in a week, and a very painful one at that. Given a couple more days there's quite a bit I would have wanted to add, but as it is I'm pretty worn out.

 

Shaun

[Devin Johnston]

Thanks Shaun, I'm glad everything worked out for you and your project, I wish that Digimation would have offered me that script to fix my problem when I was in a crunch! Oh well, thanks for the help best of luck.