Best 3D tree software/plugin?

[Dynedain]

We've tried a few, here's my opinions:

RPC - complete waste when using GI rendering engines.

SpeedTree - incredibly slow because everything is transparency mapped. Cannot convert the trees from plugin objects to geometry. Lincesing is slightly painful.

Bionatics EasyNat - licensing is a real pain, especially if you have more than one user/license. Each plant is licensed seperately. You can convert to proxys and geometry, but there is no wind support and no ability to "sculpt" the trees.

Bionatics NatFX - Haven't tried this yet, but looking into it because there is an upgrade path from EasyNat (if you replace all your library). As far as I can tell it takes away the limitations of EasyNat, except for onerous licensing.

Onyx - Have heard good things, but haven't tried it because there is no demo. Also it appears to be fairly old software without much in the way of maintenance/upgrades/support. Website implies a fairly amateur attempt at running a business.

XFrog - haven't tried it yet... How can you have Version 2.0 of XFrog 3.5? Someone doesn't understand versioning...

[CCS]

Those are incredible Charley. How might I go about getting them?
I could use a bunch of them as is, but zone 3/4 would be awesome when you have some spare time

[YoyoBoy]

An easy way to speed up the rendering trees considerably is by setting the blur value of the opacity maps to 0.01

[gafl]

hi !

Here is a WIP of a project...
Just to show the use of the Tree generator ARBORETUM.

It'is fast, easy to use, efficient, and very very cheap...




The link to get Arboretum:
http://glg86.chez-alice.fr/pages/arboretumpag.html


Gael

[CCS]

Hey gafl - that image is looking sharp.
To be honest, your past images of arboretum have been decent, but not compelling enough to interest me in buying it. The trees in this image look great. I love the fence and grass too. Is that grass just a map, or what?

[charleyc]

Ok, here is the overview. I hope it is useful enough for any of you interested.

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...2ca9b08#143721

[dapeter]

An easy way to speed up the rendering trees considerably is by setting the blur value of the opacity maps to 0.01

Better off just disabling the bitmap sampling alltogether - set the Filtering option to 'None.'

[rjw]

anyone used onyx storm?
http://www.onyxtree.com/stormx.html
does it work ok with vray?
Thinking of buying it.
Richard

[RErender]

anyone used onyx storm?
http://www.onyxtree.com/stormx.html
does it work ok with vray?
Thinking of buying it.
Richard

That's what everybody that said they are using onyx above were talking about.

[rjw]

I thought it was the standalone and importing.

[charleyc]

Onyx Tree is the standalone product for modeling the plants. TreeStorm is the 3ds max plugin for importing and using the plants. You get the best performance by using VRay Proxies, however amung other things, TreeStorm allows you to animate wind in the plants (animation is currently not supported by VRayProxy) which can be very useful.

[rjw]

ok, was being a bit dim.
I've a been thinking about getting the standalone for years, well before I was using Vray. Only just cottoned on to TreeStorm.
I'm interested in doing both, static + proxy and animating, I was thinking of www.bionatics.com/ but TreeStorm could be a better solution.
Do you know what happens when you open a file with Treestorm objects on a machine without the plugin and/or the license? (i'm not that experienced with Max, I use it to render with Vray)
Cheers

[DaForce]

If the machine doesnt have the plugin the trees wont show.
However, if you dont need the animation capabilities of the trees I would recommend you just collapse the trees to mesh objects after enabling all the UVW options for the tree. Then they are just plain old mesh objects which you can be opened on any computer.

[jacksc02]

its just a dlo that you need to copy to the render nodes to get them rendering