onyxtree

[jkletzien]

even with its problems...I think I can echo mikeh's enthusiasm for bringing in through Treestorm, and its ability to replace leaves with geometry - you simply cannot get the kind of results as far as leaf orientation, variety and reasonable rendering speed any other way (that I know of). What I am confused about is the implied use of plates in your posts, as I don't think you have to do that, only establish the leaves as sub objects before you swap them out. But, I've been wrong before.


It's what we do too, bring in through treestorm in its own file, replace leaves as necessary, and then collapse to a vrmesh.

[re:FORM]

Thanks for showing those examples. I think I'll splash out and get the 64-bit upgrade to treestorm and compare the results. I can definately see the advantage of being able to replace leaves with meshes.

[Olli96]

All i can say is that i love the treestorm plugin, the only problem i have had with it is that sometimes it seems to stops working when it comes to changing parameters or display modes. But once you svaed your scene and restarted max everything was fine again - it happens not too often. Never had a corrupt file using it.

add to treestorms side effects that it (apparently) corrupts max so that it can't be repaired but must be unistalled and reinstalled. joy.

What did the Onyx support said about that problem ? There is defintely something wrong, never heard or experienced this kind of problem. Treestorm was always a littel buggy but not that buggy

By the way, there is a nice video tutorial on how to use treestorm, texture leaves and export them as vray meshes on cgarchitect.com...

[mikeh]

Treestorm goes seriously buggy when you start disassembling the trees and trying to collapse them to mesh. I have found that, especially where you have changed the leaves to objects, that the rest of the tree will not collapse nor allow itself to be converted to mesh. I have had to export the same tree from the onyxtree software as a 3ds file, import into the file that has the same tree brought into it from treestorm, delete the leaves and that gives you the leaf objects and the rest of the tree. its at the point of dissasembling that files get corrupted and max got corrupted.

as for contacting onyxtree about that, why would i do that? What good would it do? if i thought they cared, i might do that but my past experience with them leaves me to conclude that it would be a waste of time.
mh

[mikeh]

even with its problems...I think I can echo mikeh's enthusiasm for bringing in through Treestorm, and its ability to replace leaves with geometry - you simply cannot get the kind of results as far as leaf orientation, variety and reasonable rendering speed any other way (that I know of). What I am confused about is the implied use of plates in your posts, as I don't think you have to do that, only establish the leaves as sub objects before you swap them out. But, I've been wrong before.


It's what we do too, bring in through treestorm in its own file, replace leaves as necessary, and then collapse to a vrmesh.

John, I only mentioned "plates" in response to someone elses saying that they could get the leaves in onyxtrees exported out as the multi-leaf type of i used in my first example from the regular onytree software. I came to the conclusion that they meant that they were exporting the trees out with plates that could have those type of leaves mapped to them.

You are correct that when using treestorm, you don't need plates, you just substitute the leaves out for "objects".
mh

[Olli96]

as for contacting onyxtree about that, why would i do that? What good would it do? if i thought they cared, i might do that but my past experience with them leaves me to conclude that it would be a waste of time.

Why ? Well, because you paid for the software and support and you got serious problems with it, thats why Since i dont have those problems i never contacted them so i dont know whats their response time and if they are helpful, but i certanly wouldnt hurt to contact them. Over here you wont get much help and i dont think writing a short email explaining your problems is a waste of time, just count together the minutes it tooks you to write all these post in this thread and still you dont have any help at all - but at the end its up to you....

[re:FORM]

Ok, I've got treestorm installed now but I'm don't understand how I'm supposed to work in the way you've indicated with vertex colour.

Could you briefly describe the workflow you use with treestorm to produce nice vray proxies?

I'm assuming you dont apply uv to the treestorm model... retaining the vertex colour data. Is that all you use to colour your leaves? or do you mix the vertext colour with a leaf bitmap?

Do you usually using the standard leaves that treestorm produces or do you have a library of your own leaf objects that you use to replace with?

Thanks for your help

[Olli96]

http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/VI/default.asp -> Week 24
If i use vertex colors or bitmaps depends on the tree, i prefer bitmaps for broadleafs, vertex color for palm trees and conifers.
About the leafs, the standalone version comes with a few leafs and i also like to use some of the xfrog leaf textures for my onyx trees.

[re:FORM]

thanks for the link... I'll watch those vids now.
I found I couldnt download them before; using firefox. But they seem to be downloading fine now in IE.

[mikeh]

Ok, I've got treestorm installed now but I'm don't understand how I'm supposed to work in the way you've indicated with vertex colour.

Could you briefly describe the workflow you use with treestorm to produce nice vray proxies?

I'm assuming you dont apply uv to the treestorm model... retaining the vertex colour data. Is that all you use to colour your leaves? or do you mix the vertext colour with a leaf bitmap?

Do you usually using the standard leaves that treestorm produces or do you have a library of your own leaf objects that you use to replace with?

Thanks for your help

Patrick,
If you want to use the vertex colors, tag the model with the max material sampler to load the existing material that is assigned to the tree. They will all be standard materials. switch them out for vray material. in the diffuse slot of the vray material, select the "output" from the max material selction then pop the "vertex" map into the output map. Onyxtrees vertex colors are almost always too saturated. This will give you some control over them.
mh

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

thanks mikeh,
I've got the map-layers plugin so I'm thinking of layering the vertext colour channel over a real leaf texture... it might add some nice colour variation.

So after looking at the video from VI, it looks like you still need to use opacity maps for your leaves when using treestorm with broadleaf trees/bushes... at least thats the way he does it.
Curiously, I did a quick test of opacity vs non-opacity mapped leaves. Using the same mesh the opacity mapped leaves rendered in 1:41m, non-opacity mapped leaves rendered in 1:50 !? Not exactly what I expected. Perhaps the result would be more as expected(ie slower with opacity mapped leaves) with a more complex scene.

It seems to me that if I'm having to use opacity maps anyway, why shouldnt I go ahead and use plates with some nice random curvature to boot?

One other issue... I know that to speed up opacity mapped leaves I should switch off the map filtering for the opacity map. I've also switched off the filtering in the diffuse map. Am I right in thinking that vray's DMC sampler will counter the lack of sampling in the texture maps? Is the only downside of this approach the risk of flickering in animations?

[RE:FORM_STUDIOS]

Another problem...

If I make the treestorm tree with plates and sub-objects, I can no longer convert the damn tree to a mesh! Is it just me?
Does this mean I need to make a copy of the tree without plates, convert to poly, delete the leaves, then extract the leave-plates from the other copy and attach the two meshes together? what a pain...

New workflow?...

- create treestorm tree_00
- create copy tree_00_copy
- convert tree_00 to editable mesh
- convert tree_00 to editable poly
- select all leaves on tree_00 and delete
- change params of tree_00_copy so that leaves are plates/sub-objects
- delete tree_00_copy branches
- attach tree_00_copy leaves to tree_00 branches
- convert to vrayproxy

Am I missing something here? It seemed to be a bit more straightforward importing 3ds's...

[jkletzien]

Am I missing something here? It seemed to be a bit more straightforward importing 3ds's...

It is more straightforward to do 3ds, but what I don't think you have yet done in your description is after you bring the tree in to MAX through treestorm, select it, hit the modify tab, and you have a new random seed option under the parameters tab - so you can generate variations of the tree in MAX (way better than 3ds-ing a bunch of different trees IMHO)

If you hit the adjust button above it (under the polygons tab) than you'll get a bunch of new options...including the ability to turn off levels of branches, reduce the number of leaves, ADD UVWs to various levels and convert the leaves to sub-objects.

So sadly while you do need to undergo many of the painful steps you've described, you can convert directly from a treestorm object to a vrmesh file without making it an editable poly or mesh beforehand.

I am surprised by the render times obviously, and the only thing that I can say is that geometry would still be preferable to me so we're not faced with AO pass problems later on.

[Aldaryn]

Nice job on those trees mikeh!

Treestorm is nice, has a few very useful features over the standalone 3ds export. However it's unstable as hell. One of the reasons we keep an instance of max 8 on our workstations is treestorm, as fas as we experienced, the max 8 release seems to be the most stable one. To be honest, treestorm for max 2008 sux big time.

And maan, how I wish the development of treestorm was a bit more, how should I say,... "dynamic". The generator itself changed very little in the past few yers, and it's missing some small but useful features. Imagene what you could do if you could color leaves depending on distance from the trunk, etc...

Best regards,
A.

[mikeh]

oK...here's my workflow for creating trees that are mesh leaves only...not plates.
1.google images and find suitable leaf (that you can't get out of stand alone onyxtree) and flower (if i want to have the flower as part of the model)
2. crop and adjust the image in pshop then bring the image into acad and trace over the image of the leaf.
3. import the cad leaf into max, convert it to a mesh and map it and bend it to suit. Posssibly make a leaf cluster of it. Save the file. Reset and start a new max file.
4. bring in the treestorm tree in max, go to modify panel and turn the leaves into objects.
5. substitiute the objects for the leaf(s) and or flowers
6. observe that the orientation is probably wrong or that the scale is wrong and go back to the leaf or flower and change their orientation (this means that once the orientation or scale is changed that i make a box (or whatever you want), attach the box to the revised leaf...thus giving the leaf its properties...and then get rid of the box)
7. open up tree and bring in revised leaf.
Now here is the pissy part...Onyxtrees with objects can't be turned into a mesh. So you have to detach the leaves and convert them to mesh. Import a 3ds version of the tree, move it to the same location as your treestorm tree, delete its leaves and delete the trunk, branches etc of the treestorm tree. NOW you can convert the whole thing to a mesh that will be safe to use in your scene.

It seems almost intentional on Onyxs part that this dissasembling of their trees is difficult and results in corrupted files. It would seem that they don't want their trees to be available without their plugin being installed. This is just my guess.

The problem with this is that you have to get the trees to a mesh level, unattached to treestorm, to properly map the trunk and branches.

Hope that helps.
mh