Management of Tree and Plant Libraries? How do YOU bring trees into Max?

[Morne]

Hi People

With the many different providers offering tree and plant libraries, I wanted to take a quick poll and see how you manage your plants and how do you bring it into Max.

1 ) Create thumbnails and xml and manage things entirely with ForestPack

2 ) Use 'Connector' from Design Connected to manage trees, plants and all other model libraries. Bring it into Max with Connector 1st, then place with Forestpack

3 ) Use 'Project Manager' from KStudio to manage trees, plants and all other model libraries. Bring it into Max with Project Manager 1st, then place with Forestpack

4 ) Only use Laubwerk, it comes with its own asset library and it loads Forest Libraries for you also

5 ) Some other provider's asset management

6 ) A custom developed solution

7 ) What? I'm old school, I manually import each tree from a library as I need it and relink the maps

8 ) Some other method: please specify


Bonus question:
Do you convert to VRayProxy?


Cheers all

[Joelaff]

For us it is a combination of these tings. If the trees import correctly directly from Forest's interface and all works well then this is the preferred method.

Otherwise we might manually import some trees to tweak them. If the scene is not too heavy or only has one or two customized trees they are just left in the scene file. If the scene file starts to get more than a couple hundred megs then they are XREFed. It just depends on the scene.

[dean_dmoo]

Probably 1 & 7. We use maxtree a lot and they are prepared for FP. For the other libraries just create a proxy and load it in or the original mesh for the close ups.

We also have some sets prepared to fill out the scenes.

Tbh we need to create a selection from all the sets we have and go through them and redo the materials. I'm getting fed up with doing it on a project basis. But finding the time seems almost impossible with all the commercial projects....luxury problem fortunately.

[glorybound]

I am old-school and I rarely proxy anymore. With 128Gb of ram, I don't find it necessary. If I have a lot of trees I use Forest Pack and I read that you don't need to proxy. I own Project Manager from KStudio, but I haven't used it yet. If I ever got slow (I have been waiting for a slow down for 5 years) I would probably spend some time working this out. Right now, I have a Windows File structure that I use and file things in. I don't download and save what I buy online anymore, which I need to do. Right now I have 1645 models on 3DSKY that I need to download and organize. I have a memory like an elephant, so if I need something I have purchased I go back there and download it again, the same for Turbosquid, which I have been buying from since 2008.

[glorybound]

I also have Maxtrees and Laubwerk. I don't use Laubwerk often, even though they have their own menu added.

[rusteberg]

#7 for the win

[fixeighted]

I build all my trees by hand each time I need one.
That may not be true.

Apart from that...7

[francomanko]

you missed out #10: Use maya so you have to rebuild every asset because its all for max.

I dont enjoy #10

[squintnic]

Laubwerk are bad and will not be around for long unless they up their game.

I normally make a selection of planting in a separate file per project and avoid vray proxy wherever possible.
Maxtree are banging out a lot of new sets of trees but they aren't getting better, just weirder. Still no decent Australian specific sets but lots of weird russian flowers and colorful nonsense that wont cut it in marketing work.

Whats everyone doing for animated plants? Again Grow FX has barely changed or got better in years. It looks like speedtree is the way to go, if not for their weird licensing and confusing library system

Plants have been an annoyance for many years across my time in arch viz as you can see.

[francomanko]

yeah im finding maxtree getting weirder too

[Morne]

What's your thoughts on the 3DGarden Libraries? (it's the ones that Itoo apparently make themselves seems to me)

.......avoid vray proxy wherever possible.......

Why so?

[Joelaff]

I have The 3d garden winter pack. I like how easily it works with a Forest Pack. The quality seems pretty good. I wish there was a little more variety in terms of the snow. I ended up customizing a lot of them to reduce the snow, or making my own snowy trees. But it was well worth the cost for the project for which I bought it.

Also, if you need these same trees without snow it is not to hard to delete the snow (by poly id).

[trick]

...Maxtree are banging out a lot of new sets of trees but they aren't getting better, just weirder. Still no decent Australian specific sets but lots of weird russian flowers and colorful nonsense that wont cut it in marketing work....

Yes. I think I have about 20 collections and the rest is bad. But with GrowFX I made a lot of new and better ones out of these. Also: when you really need some species you can ask them and they normally offer them in a new collection fast. I am also leaning towards SpeedTree, but with all the treegenerators I had in the last 26 years (amongst almost the complete Bionatics NatFX lib, which is now completely useless) I just leave it at Maxtree/growFx. All my objects/trees are in FBX, Max and VRayProxy and are dragged from big thumbnails in Project Manager.

[Oleg_Budeanu]

What's your thoughts on the 3DGarden Libraries? (it's the ones that Itoo apparently make themselves seems to me)



Why so?

There is little to no sense in using VRayProxy for trees, as you are using ForestPack as it handles memory pretty good. Also, you will lose randomisation possibilities of the forestcolor map (it does not work with vrayproxies). The advantage of using proxy for trees is that it is keeping your file size small. But you can x-ref from forestlibrary.

About MaxTrees - to be honest I thought that's only me, but I've found that they are using the same textures for different trees, and growfx presets are looking the same for different trees. Also, some trees are incorrectly looking, from botanical point of view.
And 3DGarden - I owe a couple of their packs and to be honest they are really good. I like the scanned trunks and leaves - they are looking quite real. No wonder the frequency is not that high, though the quality pays off. I like that they started to add FP presets, as they did in the wild grasses pack - makes it quite convenient to scatter.

[glorybound]

Now a tree subscription I would buy into. I spend so much time looking for a good tree and if one place made them all, really good ones, I would subscribe to a monthly fee. Using different trees from different places in the same scene doesn't work, because they are built so differently you can tell that they are from different libraries. I remember the seeds where you just drag to make the tree grow, stopping where you wanted. The cursor would turn into a little saw icon and ou could prune.