GroxFX

[notamondayfan]

Sup guys!

 

Just wondering what's everyone's thoughts on GrowFX?

 

How easy is it to produce nice, usable plants and trees?

Is it very time consuming?

What are the results like?

 

I'm looking to up my exterior game, and want to use animated trees and foliage. I don't like being limited by stock items, you re-use a tree 3 times and it can become obvious!

 

Also I'm interested that MaxTree and VizPark sell the 3D models, along with the GroxFX files, so they can be modified and animated.

 

Thoughts before Cyber Monday would be appreciated so I can take advantage of offers!!

 

Cheers,

Dean

[jackbird]

I love GrowFX, but it is definitely its own entire program and the UI is fairly opaque. It offers a wonderful combination of fully procedural generation with explicit control where you want it.

 

i've done it to make things as detailed as a shrub climbing all over a gate, with one specific hero branch's path defined by a spline, or a gas pump made of intertwined vines with solar panel leaves, and as quick and procedural as burning off several variations of canned indoor plants as VRay proxies to fill out indoor planters.

 

If you like creating intricate procedural shader networks, keying numbers off other numbers to get interesting results, then it's likely to be your jam.

 

e-on's Plant Factory takes a similar, but way more graphical, approach; but limits what you can make more strictly and costs a lot more.

[Andres Saarnak]

I don't have MT last pack, but everything I have from MT and VP is not that great out of the box. Shaders are not the best and models are alright, but not excellent. Then again, I haven´t found any plants collection excellent.

Maxtree and Vizpark are very good to use with Growfx. It´s very easy to take something from MT or VP and modify them to something completely new. But modelling something very good takes a huge amount of time, so it´s not easy to take a tree from MT and make something a lot better out of it.

Grove3D seems quite good. I haven´t tried it, though.

[jackbird]

Grove3D seems quite good. I haven´t tried it, though.

 

My experience with The Grove has been that it's dog slow, but lovely.

[Terri Brown]

Hi,

 

Sorry this post is too late for your Cyber Monday deal, but I purchased Grow FX over a year ago and haven't looked back. I reckon I use it pretty much every project. Vegetation is a huge part of practically every scene I create, even interiors, and I love the versatility of having a parametric model that I can customise to do exactly what I want it to do. Other bonus is that once you have a basic plant set up, the variations from there are countless. So like you said, starting from a MT or VP model and adjusting to suit your needs can work, it's just not always AS easy as it seems in the beginning...but you soon get the hang of it.

 

So yip, the learning curve is pretty steep, so take the time to experiment. There's a great forum though and I've found the support from the developers phenomenal - always a factor when purchasing new software.

 

For the price I reckon it's one of the best deals on the market - especially as there is no renewal scheme. You buy once and you got it for ever.

 

That's my five cents.

Edited December 5, 2017 by terribrown

[notamondayfan]

OK I've bought it! The sale was still on so took decicive action and it's now all mine, whahahaha!!!

 

Anyway, do you have any suggestions where to start? I see there's plenty of tutorials on the site. Any plant packs worth buying as a starting point?

 

Cheers!

[Terri Brown]

Hahaa...good buy!

 

Start with the tutorials on the site itself. One of the big guys did a great tutorial for a growFX tree...thought it was Evermotion but now I can't seem to find the tut. Will keep looking and let you know.

Personally I find the help and tut files from Exlevel slightly frustrating as they don't explain much but rather use the 'do this' tut strategy. I'm sure it's because of the Russian/English translation barrier though, so I often just ask basic questions on their forum, and if you sift through the forum you'll find lots of little nuggets.

 

I would recommend just downloading the free models on Exlevel site before buying MT or VP, which I find very expensive for what they are. There are also some free MT samples you can download from their site to start off with, and then down the line if you want to purchase more you can. Anyway that's what I would do.

 

It will take a while to wrap your head around it but it's worth the time and patience.

[Terri Brown]

So as a teaser, all the vegetation in the below image was modeled in GFX. The house is set in a fynbos reserve in the Cape, South Africa, and there are no models of fynbos out there on the web. It was the first project I ever did relying on GFX so heavily, but I was really happy with the end result. Only about 5 different species of plant here. I would say it took a day or two to get the models the way I wanted, but that's only because I was so new to the plugin.

 

[Terri Brown]

Aaah there we go...found the tut:

 

https://exlevel.com/tutorials/Xoio_CreationCustomFoliage/

[RyderSK]

I am hesitant to call GrowFx and their likes a "tree" modelers. They don't have any actual botanic algorithms like the old Onyx. It's just pure procedural modeler where you drive curves to model something that roughly resembles tree judging by your eyes. And it will always be imperfect for that very reason.

Where GrowFx fails, is that while it arguably has the best meshing tools (creating single continous mesh), it's far too complex for the task, and SpeedTree is largely superior for ease of use.

 

TheGrove is the only real successor to Onyx. And just like Onyx, it has the same drawbacks. Botanic algorithms are mostly incompatible with fully user-input approach to create whatever. But the resulting tree will always look like Tree.

 

It's the underlying mechanisms like pruning, influence of wind and light, competing of branches among themselves and shapes around them, drop and fatigue, shading and takeover, etc.. what making nature products look and feel so organic and natural.

 

Everything from GrowFx and SpeedTree even with best quality looks fake. Terribly fake. And there aren't even any high-quality collections to begin with. All these softwares are on market for years and every collection makes me sad/laugh. I can look outside of the window and..that's not how trees look. Not even in slightest. Do people still spend time in nature ;- ) ?

 

TheGrove sadly doesn't handle just any type of vegetation, it's strictly tree modeller only (and not all species) and it's in....Blender. Not sure why the developer chose that. But it's the first revolution in this stagnating part of CGI in years. Hope the guy is massive success.

[Andres Saarnak]

.... Everything from GrowFx and SpeedTree even with best quality looks fake. Terribly fake. And there aren't even any high-quality collections to begin with. All these softwares are on market for years and every collection makes me sad/laugh. ....

I agree. It does make me sad to see images being ruined by trees the industry uses.

 

TheGrove sadly doesn't handle just any type of vegetation, it's strictly tree modeller only (and not all species) and it's in....Blender. Not sure why the developer chose that. But it's the first revolution in this stagnating part of CGI in years. Hope the guy is massive success.

Do you have any images where you used Grove3D trees? Am I blind or is there really so few examples out there? Haven´t seen anybody using it. I guess everybody are scared off seeing its in Blender?

[RyderSK]

I think the software had really slow start... mostly thanks to Blender. It recently introduced animation, I think this might change its chances a bit.

 

I didn't use it myself yet either, but we're considering hiring a botanist, teach him basic 3D and let him build few in-house trees.

[rsuleyman]

I started using Grove3D a couple of months ago and I love it.

 

I use Cinema 4D so the difficulty for me was learning Blender well enough to generate and export the trees.

 

They export really well as .obj and I use Forester Multicloner to distribute the twigs as instances. Using this method, an average tree comes in at around 100k polys.

 

Here's an image I did recently with VRayC4D. The foreground trees, including the two framing the view, and some of the background ones were generated from Grove3D.

[bartoszdomiczek1]

I've been using Grove3d for about a year now (I mean I mostly have had some free time with it but once I have applied it in a commercial project to get some customized tree quickly). Generally, its Blender environment is a bit of a pain but apart from it, it's really easy to use and seeing those trees grow is the fun value of its own. I only wish they provided more maps when buying twigs.

 

 

These are three maples generated in proximity and being blocked by a building (no growth-shading applied though as I wanted the foliage to be thicker).