Vegetation tests

[Aldaryn]

...or to be a bit more precise, vegetation test. Only one so far.



We finally have rendernodes strong enough to move onto opacity mapped leaves from the old fashioned delta shaped onyx default geometry, and this is a quick test with some leaf photos I took this summer. Not much, I know, but I'm experimenting with this to see what issues come up.

So, what do you think? Looks anything like a living green thing, or it's back to the drawing board?

What I've leaned so far, is that max can't handle objects with many subobjects (leaves this time). The whole geometry is about a million faces, so it's really not that much, still, max uses almost 3 gigs of ram, and crashes almost instantly, when I try to do something more complex than panning the VP. Another thing is the VRayDirt. Recently I put some dirt on almost everything. Here you can see, that where the actual leaf geometry (a subdivided, bended plane) intersects other objects, it leaves a dark artifact. (Most visible on the brick wall close to the camera.) Well, I suppose this is exactly what is to expect from VRayDirt, but it still looks darn ugly.

Also, specular highlight seem to disappear after I turn on opacity mapping. The leaves have a strong specularity, and it is clearly visible if I turn off my opacity map, but vanishes when the opacity map is on. The node I tested this with still has RC3 installed, so if this is a bug, it might have been solved since, but I had no time to move on a fresh SP1 install.

Oh, and ignore the surroundings, just something to hold the image together.

Anyway, it's a start, hope it will get better on the way.

best regards,

A.

[zoranm]

Aldaryn,

Looks good to me. I'd only increase direct light multiplyer a bit to increase the translucent componenet. I have in my area simmilar vines but they are more yellow than yours

Z.

[MHenry]

Looks good. My only comment would be to add a little more (slight) texture variation to the leaves.

[Aldaryn]

Thanks for your comments, the scattering is barely visible in the image, but it's there, I guess I set the sun to a less appealing direction.

Variation is on the way, I made these shots several months ago in the summer, and now it's a bit hard to correct all the mistakes I made when taking those photos. Most of them are way out of focus. I guess it was a bad idea to wait this long to process them, now I can't just go out, and take new ones.

best regards,

A.

[DaForce]

Looks pretty cool.

How did you di the vines and leaf placement?

To increase the speed of your renders when using opacity mapped leaves, best to turn off filtering for the opacity maps by either setting teh bitmap blur to 0.01 or putting the filtering to none.

[Aldaryn]

Thanks DaForce

The veins is mostly the Ivy generator by Thomas Luft, however, it can only output flat planes as leave, so most of the work (and experimenting) was on how to modify the leaves to look a bit more alive. I've ended up using the volume select modifier to select various parts of each leaf controlled by gradient maps, than used the push to move those selected in and out. However, MAX can't handle this very well, when it comes to leaf modification, max tends to use almost 3 gigs of ram, and I think thats pretty insane for the vegetation of one small pergola. So in the end I had to split the ivy mesh into small groups, export hem to separate files, do the modding, and than get it back to the scene. But there must be another way. I see many of you here work with massive object counts.

Another thing thats bugging me, is the specular component, when opacity mapped, the highlight just disappears from the leaves. Any idea?

Filtering is off, I had it off for the leaves in the first place, and since max eats up almost all the mem I've got, I needed to turn it off globally, couse the system always crashed with a "cannot allocate memory for filter tables" error message.

Now this is only one, small test, I can't imagene how this all can possible work when it comes to the foliage of a complex scene.

best regards,

A.

[DaForce]

Thanks for the info, sounds like a pretty painfull job

Yeah loosing the specular is odd. can you show your material setup?

[Aldaryn]

Youre welcome. I think the current filename "AutoBackup04_recover_recover01_recover_recover_rec over01.max" sums it up pretty much.

Shader setup attached. As you can see, nothing special. Ignore the gradients for those have been used only to control the volume selects.

Reflection color is pure white, fresnel on, IOR is 1,37

Best regards,

A.

[jow]

Unlocking the Fresnel reflection IOR should fix your specular problem.
Nice Plant BTW.

[Aldaryn]

Nooo waaay... but yes ... it does work when the lock IOR is unticked! O_o I don't think this is how it's ment to work however. Hehe.

Thanks jow! Hmm, I'll render a new one with speculars. Looks a lot more alive.

best regards,

A.

[Aldaryn]

Grass topics are buzzing. Seems to be a nice time to ride the wave and post some grass.

Test for opacity mapping large ares. Testing how much aa samples needed to get distant noise free grass. There are approx ten million planes with eight different maps in the field. Separate maps for blades, clumps, and weeds. Also everything has SSS, rendertime was in this resolution approx 20 minutes on a core 2 6400 at factory clock. Memory footprint was quite small, about 1gig for the grass.



The individual blades are only visible near the pots. Sadly the rest is a bit of a chaos, but I'm working on it...

Best regards,
A.

[bardo]

only a word...beautiful!!!!

some blades are too dark...but it's acceptable.

[Jonferimonic]

You need some tomatoes in your scene, otherwise, nice.