Tree/vegetation generator, library recommendations

[ledisnomad]

I work at an architecture firm and we're trying to improve the quality of our renderings. One part of this effort is creating a well organized content library. We don't need a ton of stuff, but the quality will really matter, both in terms of appearance and usability (ability to choose low or high poly counts depending on the scene).

We are trying to decide on a strategy for vegetation. We are quite particular about the vegetation in our renderings, so we need to have good stuff.

Q1: What are people's opinions about a tree/vegetation generator versus buying collections/individual trees?

Q2: What tree/vegetation generator software/plugin do you recommend and why?

Q3: What source(s) do you use to buy collections/individual trees?

Your thoughtful advice is greatly apprecaited!

[Morne]

Hi

Q1 - you'll find you need a mixture of both. However we just don't have the time to sit and fiddle with plants so just find something "close enough" from our library
Q2 - For making stuff Onyx use to be king, but GrowFX has nicely taken over as the new king in that field in my opinion. It even now comes with a couple of "templates" you can start from
Q3 - 3Dmentor.ru (most of those were done with GrowFX I believe). Evermotion.org has a couple of good ones also.

For populating/scattering your scene with thousands or millions of these, I highly recommend Itoosoft's Forestpack

[tooves]

1. We usually just buy plant collections. At our charge-out rate its not worth our time to build stuff from scratch when we can buy a whole collection for a coupla hundred bucks. However there is always extra time spent relinking bitmaps, tweaking material settings and getting things to sit neatly in our library as well.

2. I have used Onyx in the past but not really up on latest developments. As I recall it was a bit clunky.

3. I like the XFrog libraries as they are very realistic and you can buy collections as well as individual plant types. The only downside is that they use opacity maps. I find I need to remake the alpha bitmaps so that there is no anti-aliasing and turn off filtering to speed up render times. We have also purchased a few of the 3DMentor collections and they are pretty good, 100% geometry based, no opacity map issue.
I have played with a few of the Evermotion free samples and they are of decent quality.

+1 for ForestPack Pro. Can't imagine life without it now.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

A side note if u go with trees go with opacity maps. Once u hit big render production 5-10k size u will need good opacity maps and dense planes with nice curves and so on to look like leafs...

[Neilg]

evermotion for close up, r&d group for distant. forest for scatter. xfrog for individual plants when the landscaping designer gives us a bunch of latin names.

check these first too - http://seek.autodesk.com/manufacture...source=mfrbrws

[ledisnomad]

Q2 - For making stuff Onyx use to be king, but GrowFX has nicely taken over as the new king in that field in my opinion. It even now comes with a couple of "templates" you can start from

For populating/scattering your scene with thousands or millions of these, I highly recommend Itoosoft's Forestpack

Morne, thanks for your reply. As I've been trying Onyx and GrowFX, I like the fact that there are "templates" for GrowFX. Makes getting into it a lot easier. Do you like Forestpack better than Multiscatter?

3. I like the XFrog libraries as they are very realistic and you can buy collections as well as individual plant types. The only downside is that they use opacity maps. I find I need to remake the alpha bitmaps so that there is no anti-aliasing and turn off filtering to speed up render times. We have also purchased a few of the 3DMentor collections and they are pretty good, 100% geometry based, no opacity map issue.
I have played with a few of the Evermotion free samples and they are of decent quality.

+1 for ForestPack Pro. Can't imagine life without it now.

tooves, thank you for your reply, too, and the tips about opacity maps, anti-aliasing, filtering, etc. I will have to keep looking into that stuff as I am not all that familiar with it. Have you ever use Multiscatter and also just prefer Forestpack like Morne?

A side note if u go with trees go with opacity maps. Once u hit big render production 5-10k size u will need good opacity maps and dense planes with nice curves and so on to look like leafs...

DADAL, thank you for your tips. What do you mean you need dense planes with nice curves?

evermotion for close up, r&d group for distant. forest for scatter. xfrog for individual plants when the landscaping designer gives us a bunch of latin names.

check these first too - http://seek.autodesk.com/manufacture...source=mfrbrws

cubiclegangster, thanks for the information. I hadn't heard of R&D group. The trees look really nice. The Autodesk Seek stuff looks pretty good, too.

Has anybody tried Avizstudio's free ATree3D or any of their other plugins? Free sounds pretty nice and the 3dtreexchange has some nice looking free trees made using it.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

most of plants u will find with flad 4 vertex leafs. Its beter if they are bended and so on they look more natural then.

[ledisnomad]

most of plants u will find with flad 4 vertex leafs. Its beter if they are bended and so on they look more natural then.

Thanks. I understand now. I'll take that into account for close-ups.