Show us your trees!

[gafl]

Hi all !

For tom,
About 3d flowers, there is plant studio.It's free and is not so bad at all.
You make any flower/plant you want and convert them in 3ds.
Here is the link:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

It's seems a bit old fashionned but it is a very good program.

About my trees, I had to build my own script, and is not so bad too.
I'll show my new version with the use of Vray fur.
Bye
Gael

[tom schuelke]

Hi Gafl.

Many thanks for the link ill have a try for it.



@ Erik de Graaf,

Hmm well i am not sure. the trees are realy heavy and also good. the floor uses 2d displacement and so produces very many triangles also.

this way mamory goes up to about 2 gig and more sometimes depending on the scene.

maybe this worked for you because you used instances ? Most time we use different trees.

on the other hand wit proxies i also did do a scene (only for testing ) with about 900 000 000 Polys , lightchache and it still rendered.

how exact did you build up your scene ?

Tom

[Erik de Graaf]

Well i use one or two type of trees and scale and rotate them to make them look different. But i have also had succes with 6 or 7 different type of trees. Usually there is also a lot of displacment in my scenes to make grass, most of the time i fill the horizon with grass wich can be a few hundred meters of displaced grass. I never used 10 unique trees, i quess that could make the big difference. Memory usage is most of the time around 2,3 or 2,4 gig.

Mabye you can try using less different trees and scale and rotate them to make them look different.

Erik

[corey]

Erik,

Just out of curosity, have you tried to achieve close to such a feat as 200 million polys with the more recent builds?

Corey

[Erik de Graaf]

Nope haven't tried that yet, the first time i used a new build i got all kinds of memory problems with 2d displacement. This was 1.45.70, since then i am just following progress on the new build, i don't use it for production.

I will give the last version a try soon.

Erik

[flipside]

Hi all !

For tom,
About 3d flowers, there is plant studio.It's free and is not so bad at all.
You make any flower/plant you want and convert them in 3ds.
Here is the link:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

It's seems a bit old fashionned but it is a very good program.

About my trees, I had to build my own script, and is not so bad too.
I'll show my new version with the use of Vray fur.
Bye
Gael

Hi Gael,

Can you tell me how you export the plants? I can get it to import in max, but it doesn't look like the plant in plantstudio at all. Usually it has 100 branches in the same position and stuff like that. I tried lots of option, without luck.

thanks,

wouter

[gafl]

Sorry !
Yes I didn't remember this problem...
In fact, I export the flower in obj format to turn it into 3ds with DeepExploration.

The 3ds format from plant studio is recognized without any problem in DeepExploration but not in Max ...!!!!

If you need to transform your plant in deepexploration for a 3ds one, I can do it without any problem.

I found obj format better than the others to get 3ds.
Bye
Gael

[flipside]

Yeah I opened the 3ds in rhino and it worked

But I find it a bit difficult to get the plant I want, too many parameters for me

[gafl]

Cool !

About the obj export in plant studio, I've just checked it and You have to uncheck "Double polygon on 3d objects" else you will have a lot
of problems with inverted normals in max...

Once your 3ds object in max, add a smooth modificator, a vray material
with the double face checked.

That's all!

Well, what about the way of use of the program, yes it's not very simple.
But if you look well, you'll find the good parameters.
I don't find it easy too...But possible.
Moreover you can do a lot of different species.

Have a good week end !
Doei !
Gael

[Lucetius]

We've been fighting with Speedtrees on a recent project and I decided to run a test this weekend.

Using the standard Max Foliage, I created 50 unique trees and assigned my own materials. I took 5 trees at a time and Vray meshed them. (10 vraymesh items total) I then copied (not instanced) them till I had 6000 trees. I added a large plane with Displaced grass, a sun, gi and animated a camera. (flyover, 1000 frames)

Each tree is approx 20,000 polys which gives approx 120million polys total.

I rendered this across 25 slaves of varying specs. Animation rendered without a single error with times that I was pretty pleased with. (considering the results we are getting with speedtree)

Our website is down at the moment so I'll just post the results below. I'll post images once our site is back online

output 720x480
Alias: QMC: 2,4
GI: pri:1.0, irr
sec:.5, QMC
IRR:min-4, max-3, clr.4, nrm.4, dist.1 hsph30, int30
qmc:adaptive:.85, noise:.005, min:8

results:
Dual opteron 248,6gig: average 21.31 min per frame (win64)

Dual MP2800 4gig ram: average 29.64 min per frame
Dual MP2800 2gig ram: average 30.28 min per frame
Dual MP2800 1gig ram: average 32.53 min per frame

Dual Intel2.2 1gig ram: average 36.04 min per frame

Dual MP2100 2gig ram: average 38.91 min per frame
Dual MP2100 1gig ram: average 38.24 min per frame

Dual MP2000, 1gig ram: average 38.78 min per frame

This tells me that large forests are certainly possible using Vraymesh. It also tells me that when considering our upgrade strategy, we will focus on processor upgrades 1st and additional ram 2nd.

Again, I'll post images as soon as our site is back on-line (should be Monday)

[Lucetius]

Forgot to mention.

Max 7, Vray ver. .14

[flipside]

I also tried many trees with vraymesh:

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...er=asc&start=0

bottom of page 1200million polies in total, only 1 vraymesh however, instanced and rotated/scaled.

The thing I don't like is that materials are not in the vraymesh. For simple things this is no problem, I used multi sub object material and assigned that to the vraymesh. But this would not be possible on large meshes with lots of objects (unless you export them all seperately, lots of work)

wouter

[Lucetius]

Here's some pics of our test.

[gafl]

Funny !

I think the surrounded colour of your leaf map is white, you'd better put the same color of your leaf (here red) outline and use another map for the opacity in black and white.

how many trees do you have ???
Gael

[corey]

For those interested in converting natfx or any object material that is a standard material using an opacity map you can convert to vray material and vray opacity map by doing this:

Edit (at your own risk) the maxscript file named vrayutil.ms located in your maxroot/scripts/startup folder

Once opened for editiing find the lines (should be close to the top).

fn convertFrom_Standard origMtl = (
r=VRayMtl()
r.name=origMtl.name

Add the following lines.

-- opacity
r.texmap_opacity=origMtl.opacityMap
r.texmap_opacity_on=origMtl.opacityMapEnable
r.texmap_opacity_multiplier=origMtl.opacityMapAmou nt