Replacing leaves on a tree

[tricky]

I am using a script called AEC Leaf Replacer (or something like that) to replace leaves on an Onyx tree I have created. The script is very clever, but it is VERY slow. You basically pick the material ID of the objects you need to change and select the new leaf geometry.

Does anybody know of a quicker version? I've done a search on ScriptSpot to no avail.

[peterguthrie]

It is super slow! I was doing it like that for a while but then came to the conclusion that opacity leaves, taking the long term view, were quicker.

One tip though, you can break your tree leaves object into lots of smaller bits (i used to break it into 10-20 bits) and then run the script with them all selected, it will process them one by one and seems to work a lot quicker.

[tricky]

Fair enough.
Everything I read about VRay and plants is "Stay Clear Of Opacity Mapped Geometry!". It would be nice if Onyx had a few more options with its leaves.

[joconnell]

The stay clear is true to an extent - the main factor being if you've got an opacity map that has grey pixels in it. A black pixel in the map is totally transparent so the raytracer shoots right through, a white pixel is totally opaque so the raytracer stops or bounces off. A grey value however has to do both and if one of those rays carries on and hits another grey opacity value in another leaf you're into a huge situation of extra rays - So if you keep literally two colour nasty looking opacity maps with filtering turned off for them, your speed hit won't be as bad as before!

[peterguthrie]

when I did this project http://www.peterguthrie.net/visualisation/farnsworth01/ my conclusion, having tested both techniques, was that opacity leaves were quicker. Although this was really due to the fact that the geometry versions took sooooo much memory. I have 12gb ram and there were real slow downs due to running out of memory with the geometry leaf trees.

If you just have 1 or 2 types of (complex) tree then geometry leaves might be the way to go, but in my tests they only rendered marginally quicker and certainly not worth the extra preparation time.

Something to consider at least if you are going to be doing large scenes with lots of different trees.

More leaf options in onyxtree would be useful.... What I really want is a decent software company to make a good solid tree modeling program. It should be easy to understand, flexible, quick and no mention of technical terms like phyllotaxy!

[peterguthrie]

and what joconnell said too!

[tricky]

What I really want is a decent software company to make a good solid tree modeling program. It should be easy to understand, flexible, quick and no mention of technical terms like phyllotaxy!

I agree. Onyx is great and I can just about get a half decent tree out of it. My main problems are with leaves looking a bit shit, and getting the bark to look nice (I struggle to find good textures for this). The junctions between boughs and trunk just never look right either.

Shrubs and flowers are even trickier (for me at any rate). I have a shitty library of shrubs, and Onyx gives you very little standard shrubs to start out, so starting from scratch is difficult. Flowers: well, I've never had much success with them.