Onyxtree and vrmeshes

[CCS]

good morning.

I just got Onyx Tree Pro, and I've been playing around with creating trees. From what I've seen so far, I am pleased with my decision and I highly recommend it!

My current project contains a lot of pine trees. Onyx, being the faithful modeler it is, creates polys for each needle This makes for a somewhat large file.

I have been making the trees manageable by simplifying and optimizing, then onverting to a vrmesh. This technique is working for all but the heaviest needled trees like spruces. They have so many branches and needles they are just not feasible to load (several hundred MB 3ds).

I tried creating a sparser tree, which worked, but it's just not believable. I'm looking for options. My only thought this morning has been to create a trunk separately, then create 3 or so detailed branches, convert each branch to a vrmesh and instance the proxies to populate the tree. Any thoughts on that? Any better ideas?

Thanks

[Trapezium]

Sounds like a good idea to me. This may be obvious but to get an even more random look you could create more instances of even a smaller branch and place it on the larger branches.

--Jon

[paulison]

hmm thanks for the tip CSS. Im currently trying to decide on which program to go for trees as well. I like the sound of having about 320 base trees as a starting point for the garden suite package. Compared to natfx this seems cheap....

So the leaves are all geometry? this renders faster in vray than opacity mapped leaf textures right? The tests ive done with xfrog always seem to end up taking too long.

Ive got a big landscaping job to do from start to finish in 1 week and i have no trees.....and no idea how to make them GOOD in vray without huge rendertimes. Its just a land development with a 1 minute animation down the contral road (trees either side with footpaths and ppl etc). considering animated cars and people on a seperate pass and the trees on its own pass. Im on the verge of nocking the job back though because of the rediculous timeframe (and my lack of knowledge in this area). what do you guys think?

Will probably buy oxyntree tomorrow depending on how you guys reply....

BTW: i watch the guy i work with render VERY quickly vegetation using maya paint effects and am very jealous!!!

[anders]

We have bought a bunch of xfrog trees, but they all use opacity mapped leaf's, so they are slow to render!

Last week we tried a few onyx to proxy tests and they blow me away!

so untill clip maps are as fast as poly leaf's I would have to say go for onyx!


/stensgaard

[powerandrubber]

I've had a little luck using displacement for pine needles. Since you can't apply displacement at sub obj level (that I know of anyway), detach the trunck and major branches so the secondary branches are a seperate object. 3D displacement takes FOREVER and is not an option so hopefully your trees have UVW mapping built in so you can use 2D displacement. I made my displacement bitmap in PS by making a white background and painting it black with 50% opacity using the "disolve mode". To get good results I had to crop the bitmap a lot in the material editor otherwise the needles were too dense. My pine tree here is a standard viz tree with needles omitted, converted to ed mesh with various elements detached for different displacement applications. (The trunck has bark displacement). Also the needles material uses a grass bitmap with a little self illumination and the lower branches purposley don't have needles so that they don't block the house too much.

[jow]

i must say the displacement pine tree works pretty well powerandrubber. looking at it,it could also be moded to look like a monkey puzzle tree by giving it more displacement.

ccs, can apply leaf bitmaps to the onyx trees like with xfrog?

cheers.

[paulison]

Thanks guys, I'm going to go down the path of oynxtree but will try it out first (i think there is a demo). We ended up saying the job was possible in 1 week so are doing a crappy version in another peice of software starting with A with a little * in it.

those displacement pine needles look great! I wonder how the job would go if you used 100s of these trees though?

So does the UV mapping export from onxytree correctly? I also notice there is a max plaugin version of oynxtree...is this what you guys were talking about? or one of the generators such as boadleaf

[mike.edel]

the max plugin is called treestorm
http://www.onyxtree.com/stormx.html
comes with tree classic modeller for about $500 and transfers uv coordinates
it allows you to adjust the poly count of the model and to animate it (hence the name storm)
have a look at their demo movies

mike

[digitarch]

What about Fur for the needles?

[analogueWay]

I did some tests with OnyxTree and had great results as far as rendering animation frames, but the file sizes grew to be prohibitively large. SpeedTree 3, on the other hand, looked as good (or better) and didn't need the same disc space.

Does anyone have experience with SpeedTree 3 and Vray? I used SpeedTree 2 with Finalrender a while back and was pretty impressed with it.

Anyway, unless someone here gives me reason to act otherwise, I am going to purchase SpeedTree 3 in the next round of budgeting.

[Dynedain]

SpeedTree 3 is pretty much identical to 2...slightly expanded library, and now supposedly a lot of it has been opened to maxscript.

If you still have 2, try it out before ordering 3

[powerandrubber]

A forest test using displacement needles.

[priad]

Have you try onyxflower?
I have problem with xfrog and the onyx flower librarie seems to be more an more complete.
Cheers