Vray hates speedtree

[gitano_anton]

In the tests i´ve made, the blend mtl. with a standard diffuse goes faster than the blend mtl. with Vray diffusse.

Can anybody explain me this stuff, i walk towards madness!!

Thanks.

[Da_elf]

like i mentioned in the message you sent me. that technique i came up with is obsolete since vlado added the affect alpha option to the vray material.

[lander]

So what is the ultimate setup for speedtree?
With one medium density tree, one direct ligth, Vray shadow, default environment and Very low setting in the irradiance map I get a 9+ minute rendering on a frame size 480x384. oh and a roundplane.

This does not rock for me.

Any suggestions?

[percydaman]

I think those issues are going to be properly addressed with vray 1.5

[Da_elf]

i actually use x-frog trees with opacity mapped leaves. however when im using them i always use a proxy object of them rather than the model itself. 1.5 will show you guys the gate to the promise land i guess hehe. especially if clip maps are added. not sure if that was high on his list but it will speed up rendering tonnes im sure. hmmm. means ill have to go and redo all my x-frog trees to use clip maps instead of vray materials on the leaves hehe

[Richard McCarthy]

erm, sorry to budge in like this
But I think I'm missing a lot of back-chat....
So, right now is it no go for Speedtree with Vray?...

[lander]

I have been able to stay away from trees for a loong time now...... up to now.

So has there been any progress on the workflow SpeedTree-> V-ray?

I still kind of like ST so it would be very nice to be ablo to render in V-ray without to much fix and rendertimes.

-lander

[vlado]

Last time I checked, there were several problems with speedtree:

(*) Sometimes the tree trunk is not smoothed correctly and appears faceted. I have not been able to get this to work properly - I suppose because SpeedTree is using some new stuff in 3dsmax that VRay does not yet support.

(*) The normals for the leaves render always in the same direction (towards the camera) - probably because of the same reason as above.

(*) Some speedtree's have overlapping faces which, combined with opacity mapping, brings rendering to a crawl. A work-around is to force 2-sided materials and increase the secondary rays bias - although this will affect the rest of the scene too.

These issues have made us to not recommend using SpeedTree with VRay. There are other plugins that work better (Bionautics, I think, is one).

Best regards,
Vlado

[lander]

Thank's Vlado for your as always quick reply.
I never understood how you ever get anything done.

Not that it would have effected me since I already had ST before I got V-ray. But someone (me) will inform the ppl at digimation that it doesn't work well with V-ray as it states on their site. But rather the other way around.

-lander

[room217]

Just FYI,

I've had numerous problems with speedtree's wind.

-randy

[analogueWay]

I was wondering if Randy "Speed Tree is Evil" would weigh in on this discussion.

I did some quick tests a while back with Bionatics Trees and Speedtree 3, and found that Speedtree rendered faster. But, these were just a few controlled tests with a few trees. They didn't really have any statistical significance - especially since I didn't run into any known Speedtree problems.

I have used Xfrog in the past with great success (albeit with a different renderer). Xfrog combined with VRay proxies may just be the way to go. Can anyone else comment on this? Someday soon I need to recommend a tree purchase for my current work group, so I pay close attention to anything that is said about trees in these forums.

-Jeremy

[room217]

Hey Jeremy,

I've had truly unbelievable results with a free xfrog tree (haven't purchaced it yet) without opacity mapped leaves and vray proxies.

I rendered over a billion faces using thousands of scattered trees with render times around 2 mins!

speedtree can kiss my... lol

-randy

[rpc212]

So Speedtree is definetly a no-no with regards to working with Vray? I am looking for a tree modelling plug-in and am leaning towards Onyx TreeStorm. TreeStorm seems to come with a nice library of trees too.

[Dynedain]

I've been using speed tree with some limited success, but i usually have to edit their default library of trees to try to reduce the coplanar surfaces.

I have a hunch its been more hassle than its worth and am interested in looking at the alternatives