Animated trees

[suurland]

What solution is available for animated trees? Looking for something that is a bit more then just random animation on the leafs, the branch and so on should move a little bit too. Also I would prefer a 3dsmax solution.. No idea if this is even possible.

Hope some of the arch viz guys out there can help me.

/Thomas

[instinct]

we used treestorm. they got wind animation that actually looks pretty nice. Would be damn nice if there will be a way to convert them to animated proxies :P

Anyways the wind controls are pretty nifty and affect the different parts differently.

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[mike_kennedy]

second tree strom here. You can cache the mesh, might take a try or two though...leaves can get messed up....animated proxies are coming according to Vlado .....can't wait

[tricky]

Old thread, but why start a new one???

Now that we have animated proxies, can TreeStorm trees with wind animation simply be converted into animated VrayProxies?

[jacksc02]

yes you can, its nice and easy

[tricky]

Right, I've given it a try with a resonably high poly maple tree, and the actual conversion to an animated VRayProxy is nice and easy (though the proxy is around 2GB!). However, when I play back the VRayProxy, the tree animation is not smooth all the way through: it occasionally jumps about a bit and looks very unnatural. I will render out the sequence and see if it renders the same, but I am not hopeful.

Unfortunatly, it is difficult for me to play back the un-proxied version in a viewport as the poly count is too high.

Has anyone had this kind of issue with treestorm trees? I can email you the treestorm onyx file if you like...

[tricky]

OK. It seems it may just be the way that VRayProxies are displayed in the VP.

[jacksc02]

good to hear you have it figured out!
be careful with the proxy sizes over networks, I have found that sometimes leaving key trees as treestorm trees can be far more memory efficient than proxies

[tricky]

I had wondered about that. Are there in fact any benefits to creating proxies out of them?

[instinct]

way less memory use

Regards,
Thorsten

[tricky]

I'm getting a bit of weirdness whereby some leaves suddenly appear for one frame. Any ideas what would cause this? This is a backburner render:- there is only one type of leaf using bitmaps/opacity maps. All the render nodes can see all of the files without problem.

[tricky]

way less memory use

Regards,
Thorsten

I assumed that TreeStorm would have some pretty clever functionality that would keep the memory useage low. Evidently I am wrong.

(I've just done a small test. Using 4 identical VrayProxy files (around 2GB proxy files), the average render time is 8:24. Using four TreeStorm trees however, each with a different random seed, the average render time is 3:06. This suggests that using VrayProxies is significantly slower.)

[Da_elf]

yeah. but try to render with 200 storm trees then try to render with 200 vray proxies

[mike_kennedy]

Vlado has stated that Max instances can be faster...but proxies will rarely run you out of memory

[tricky]

yeah. but try to render with 200 storm trees then try to render with 200 vray proxies

Fair point. My scenes are unlikely to have that many trees. I was aware that proxies may be slower. I didn't appreciate by how much!