plates vs mesh

[womble]

In that example (of the 100 tree's) have you turned off bitmap filtering on the opacity maps on the plate scene?

Just curious.

Surely though if it's such an issue to have more than a few Treestorm tree's in a single scene then you are infact saving time/hassle by just using mapped planes? I sure wouldn't want my scene's being corrupted by faffing around trying to dissasociate treestorm tree's. Unless you plan on not using the treestorm tree's?

[mikeh]

if you look at the plates image, you'll see that it is labeled as filtering off.

As for corrupting files. The treestorm tree is made as a stand alone file. the only file that could get corrupted is it. Once it is disassociated from treestorm it is no different than the imported 3ds tree with plates.....it just renders faster. there is no crashing or corruption.

it is the act of disassociation that is the sensitive part. After that it's no problem.

As for the difference in rendering times, my scenes can have a thousand trees. The hit to rendering is a big deal when you are doing an animation and every second counts. That is why i prefer the mesh trees over the plate trees.
mh

[womble]

Fair enough. Sorry didn't see the actual images (can't access that hosting site here at work).

Is the meshing of the folgiage an actual option in treestorm (sorry, I've never used it before) or do you create the meshing yourself by drawing around a map?

[Aldaryn]

Yup, pure mesh will always render faster than the opacity mapped one with this method VRay is currently using. But opacity mapped leaves have some advantages over the mesh one. Once converted to proxy, it's easier to change the shape and color of the leaves in a hurry. And if you've got a dozen trees each weighting almost half a gig is mesh size, it helps to keep polycounts at a reasonable level. I know with proxies you can render zillions, but that's only true if you don't use too many *unique* heavy proxie sets.

I'm not for, or against, because we use both types of trees heer effectively. You just need to choose the tools you need to get your job done wisely.

Best regards,
A.

[mikeh]

Fair enough. Sorry didn't see the actual images (can't access that hosting site here at work).

Is the meshing of the folgiage an actual option in treestorm (sorry, I've never used it before) or do you create the meshing yourself by drawing around a map?

Onyxtrees has a limited number of mesh leaves. the ones in this tree is from a map traced over in autocad and brought into max.
mh

[mikeh]

last test...close up of 600 trees.

mesh....6:10 min
plates...8:21 min
mh

http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs126&d=08142&...s-close594.jpg


http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs126&d=08142&...s-close441.jpg

[MoonDoggie]

Still, color me very impressed Vray does the opacity ones still very quickly. (If filtering is off)

[RErender]

Interesting, great tests thanks for sharing!

[womble]

This might well be beyond the realms of your testing but it would be interesting to see how the times vary when several types of tree are used. Whether it would have an effect or not.