Laubwerk releases new 3ds Max procedural plants kit

[glorybound]

Has anybody played with this yet?
http://www.laubwerk.com/technology/

[Neilg]

It bothers me that they don't have a single screenshot of the interface or it working - I think this might be the first tool like i've seen which doesn't have any.

edit: they do, http://www.laubwerk.com/technology/laubwerk-player/
looks good.

[glorybound]

It's working really nicely

[voltron7]

Looks interesting enough to try the freebie I guess...Thanks for the link Bobby

[glorybound]

it has tree age, and season, for each specie. I tried rendering one out, and it was looking good, but really slow. When I have more time I'll play with it.

[dlparisi]

Thanks Bobby, looks cool. It crashes a lot for me though whenever I try and render the tree. I'll give it another go when I have more time.

[voltron7]

I noticed their V-Ray material for the leaves (Acer sp.) has filtering enabled in the opacity map. Is thias still a "no-no" for V-Ray? No biggie, just curious if it might explain some of the slowness?

Well, I got to try it out finally, and it seems promising, although I don't really "need" another tree plugin.
I made a 2000' x 2000' plane with (large scale noise added) and a V-Ray sun/sky (6 subdivisions.)

This is using three plant models in the free kit and scatterd with Forest Pro.
Went throught the mat files and removed opacity filtering and results were decent, I think...
RAM usage was about 3709M at peak



Best part was, no crashes, seems very stable.

[Itoosoft]

This is using three plant models in the free kit and scatterd with Forest Pro.
Went throught the mat files and removed opacity filtering and results were decent, I think...

Just a quick tip: you can remove the opacity filtering from Forest, with a single click, using Material->Optimize Materials.

[voltron7]

Just a quick tip: you can remove the opacity filtering from Forest, with a single click, using Material->Optimize Materials.

Thanks, that's a great tip!

[trixian]

Last I looked at this plugin, I got a very distinctive "Bionatix NatFX" feel from the topology and shape of the branches and foliage.
I think I'll pass on this one.

[glorybound]

Bionatix NatFX

Oh brother, do I remember that. I got sales calls daily, for weeks, before I dropped down $1,500. After I got it, tried to unsuccessfully work with it, nobody would answer my calls. It took me a long time to purchase another plug-in, and that was Autograss, in which the nightmare replayed itself. Now, Autograss is now working very well, but NatFX is long gone.

[glorybound]

I guess it's still around, but now for long.

[trick]

NatFX should be OFF the market: I think I used 2 of the more than 100 seeds I have a few times and they still don't come close to ANY tree made with Onyx or coming from Evermotion, let alone Speedtree or GrowFX. I didn't see an update since years, meaning they must be close to ..... a shutdown !!!!

[jacksc02]

The trees/plugin is good although I am having a few issues actually rendering a tree!
Hopefully they can smooth the transitions between the branches and trunks......

[timm.dapper]

Hi there,

I am CTO of Laubwerk and just found this thread, so I figured it might be nice to chime in. Just as a general note, we recently uploaded an update to version 1.0.2 to our download area. So if you grabbed the freebie and got an earlier version, please feel free to log in again and get the new download. It may fix a few issues that some you were having.

The trees/plugin is good although I am having a few issues actually rendering a tree!
Hopefully they can smooth the transitions between the branches and trunks......

Having issues with actually rendering a tree is not good. It would be great if you could try the update above (if you haven't already) and if that doesn't help, please contact us via support@laubwerk.com with a few details (3ds Max Version, OS version, V-Ray version, simple example scene and screenshot if possible) so we can figure out what is going wrong for you.

Regarding the smoothing: I can't give any definite date, yet, but that's one thing that is very high up on our agenda, so please stay tuned.

I noticed their V-Ray material for the leaves (Acer sp.) has filtering enabled in the opacity map. Is thias still a "no-no" for V-Ray? No biggie, just curious if it might explain some of the slowness?

Well, I got to try it out finally, and it seems promising, although I don't really "need" another tree plugin.
I made a 2000' x 2000' plane with (large scale noise added) and a V-Ray sun/sky (6 subdivisions.)

This is using three plant models in the free kit and scatterd with Forest Pro.
Went throught the mat files and removed opacity filtering and results were decent, I think...
RAM usage was about 3709M at peak

Best part was, no crashes, seems very stable.

Thanks for the heads up! Regarding the filtering: We weren't sure about the details, because leaving filtering on hits the render time noticeably but switching it off leaves the regular Anti-Aliasing with the work to filter small detail. We changed this in an update and now switch filtering off by default, because the speed hit seemed to be the bigger issue (generally the render times seemed to be twice as long with filtering on for scenes with a lot of greenery).

Thanks Bobby, looks cool. It crashes a lot for me though whenever I try and render the tree. I'll give it another go when I have more time.

That's bad. It would be great if you could check our update and, in case it still happens, would contact us with details at support@laubwerk.com with a few details like already mentioned above (3ds Max Version, OS version, V-Ray version, simple example scene and screenshot if possible), so we can look into this.

it has tree age, and season, for each specie. I tried rendering one out, and it was looking good, but really slow. When I have more time I'll play with it.

We are working hard on making this product work well out of the box. Did you try switching opacity filtering off? Also please definitely try to play around with the LoD options. Even if you are so close to the tree, that using Leaf Amount (which removes leaves and scales the remaining ones to maintain density) is not an option, removing the finer branches can help a lot with the amount of geometry.

We're really eager to make this a great product and hear as much feedback as we can get!

Best
Timm