Forest Lite stress testing

[Itoosoft]

Hi all,

This is a sample scene using Forest Pack Lite 3.2 with VRay. Not a high quality image, only a demo to create some billions of polygons. There are roughly 1 million of 3D trees here, each one have 500.000 polys.

There are more samples at our Gallery, although most of them for Mental Ray.

Forest Pack Lite 3.2 is available to download at www.itoosoft.com. It can be used freely for all personal and commercial projects.



Carlos Quintero
Itoo Software
www.itoosoft.com

[voltron7]

Nice, this looks interesting, how long was that one rendering? Where are the tree models from, part of FPL?

[mikeh]

i've had forest pro for years and could never understand the hoopla over vray scatter when forest pro does the same and more.
mh

[sea2stars]

Yeah. I think it's time to bug the higher powers to upgrade our copy.

[Itoosoft]

Nice, this looks interesting, how long was that one rendering? Where are the tree models from, part of FPL?

The rendering time was 16 minutes using low irradiance map, in a 3.4 Ghz Quad-Core, 1.8 Gb memory used.

Trees are modified xfrog plants (not included with Forest). The plugin can use billboards, meshes or VRay proxies.

Carlos Quintero
Itoo Software
www.itoosoft.com

[voltron7]

Cool, thanks for the info, I will try it, too.
How many unique tree models are used there?

[sea2stars]

There are more samples at our Gallery, although most of them for Mental Ray.

Odd that there aren't more Vray examples. Under the Know problems for Mental Ray it's clearly stated:

If you really need to use millions of complex trees in your scenes, we suggest you switch to VRay. This renderer is much more stable and fast, and using it together Forest is an amazing experience.

[Itoosoft]

Cool, thanks for the info, I will try it, too.
How many unique tree models are used there?

We used three models, in the Gallery there is near shot of the trees (Mental Ray picture). It's posible to randomize material colors to add more variation, but we didn't use it because Forest Lite has this option disabled.

If you need some trees to test plugin, you can get some models from the Urban Park tutorial, or download the 100 free xfrogplants from Autodesk (there is a link at our homepage).

Carlos Quintero
Itoo Software
www.itoosoft.com

[duke2]

What's the preprocessing time like? Is there an upper limit to the amount of polys you can have in total?

[Pixelab]

It looks promising, but I can't render a scene with far less trees than you without crashing (memory reaching 3,5 G under max 7.0)

I'm using a proxy tree of approx 200.000 faces with multi sub material, with 20 trees it already raches 1,5 Go. It is like the trees were copied instead of instanced...

Is there any special trick to cap the memory usage within the program while using vray ? What funcionality has to be enabled/disabled when using with vray?

[duke2]

It looks promising, but I can't render a scene with far less trees than you without crashing (memory reaching 3,5 G under max 7.0)

I'm using a proxy tree of approx 200.000 faces with multi sub material, with 20 trees it already raches 1,5 Go. It is like the trees were copied instead of instanced...

Is there any special trick to cap the memory usage within the program while using vray ? What funcionality has to be enabled/disabled when using with vray?

System->dynamic memory limit.

[Itoosoft]

What's the preprocessing time like? Is there an upper limit to the amount of polys you can have in total?

Preprocessing time was about 3 or 4 seconds for a million of trees.

I'm not sure if there is an upper limit, we have rendered scenes with 3 millions of items in 6 minutes... really not very useful, because since the plugin builds only the trees visible by the camera, at 1080p there are more trees than pixels in the image.

[Itoosoft]

It looks promising, but I can't render a scene with far less trees than you without crashing (memory reaching 3,5 G under max 7.0)

Sorry, but minimum requirements to use the native shader are Max 9 with VRay 1.5. There is not VRay 1.5 for Max 7, and in Max 8 the plugin cannot be compiled because a problem with the SDK headers.

With Max 7, Forest works in the old way, building a big mesh for all trees.

I admit that these requirements are a bit hidden in the release notes, i'm going to copy them in a more a accessible page in the website.

[duke2]

I really like the camera view clipping feature If I get the time i'd like to do a comparison with VRS2.5. These were both done with Forest Lite 3.0, the close-up was ~15m, the distant one ~31m - both on dual Xeon 2.8ghz, 8gb ram, XP64, 2009-64, SP3A. (DMC AA, 1-16, .00.

[raistlin]

impressive... and interesting, it work's fine and tricky than vrayscatter...