Best tree plug-in for max/vray?

[rpc212]

What is the best tree plug-in for Max/Vray? I want one that I can use for close-ups and distance shots of trees and flowers/plants.

Thanks.

[ezrhythm]

i would not recommend any plugins, use pure geometry.
Try ONYX...

[paulison]

same Oynxtree treestorm. Get the full package as you get quite a lot to choose from in the libraries.

Im finding they render much faster in an already large polycount scene such as a large building compared to xfrog plants with opacity mapping

i like the xfrog plants...really nice flowers etc, but for trees...go for Oynxtree

[jaggos]

Hi,
try Bionatics and they have a demo wich gives you a good taste.

http://www.bionatics.com

Hope it helps

[RANONandPARTNER]

Trees and VRAY

I'm using RPC, however I have to exclude them from GI.

[rpc212]

Looking at TreeStorm package. What about Itoosoft Forest? Is Forest no good for close-ups? Any problems with Vray either TreeStorm or Forest?

Thanks,

[rpc212]

Looked at TreeStorm at Onyx and have to say it looks pretty cool!

How well does it work as far as intuitiveness goes and is it easy to model actual trees?
Is it as easy as it says on the website to integrate the trees into a scene?

Thanks guys,

[Infrared digital]

What about low level plants, shrubs and bushes ?

Is Onyx good for this also ?

n

[vlado]

I know that Bionautics have tested V-Ray with their trees and they said it works well.

Best regards,
Vlado

[rpc212]

Just got Onyx Garden Superbundle and it looks just great! Tons of stuff and can output geometry and billboards. Has flowers too. What a great package for a decent price in comparison to texture collections and other plug-ins. Avoided Speedtree on advice from you guys and glad I did and got Onyx instead.

Thanks for the advice!

[Buck]

Onyx is nice because you can give the trees wind

[Syclone1]

Im also looking for another plugin to create trees and such and Im probabily going to order from Onyx as Bionatics looks good and all but their prices are way to high in my opinion for what you get.

-dave

[dbuchhofer]

Just know the ones we have here.. none of which i'm even remotely happy with as yet.

I know that Bionautics have tested V-Ray with their trees and they said it works well.

Bionatic trees work well, with a few caveats. First, the full geometry trees are ok, but they're not very easy to get to be 'full' trees.. they generally look pretty sparse until you bump the tree age up at 40+years old. which tends to result in very large poly counts per tree. Understood.

the billboard trees have the same problem as any billboard trees.. they're slow to render due to overlapping transparencies.

the advantage of bionatics being that you can 'Generate' a tree using a different random seed and continue to do this until you get one that looks ok.. (Sometimes this takes a LONG time.. heh.)

and its expensive, with a yearly 'service' fee if you actually want upgrades. Which is why my bionatics is still for max 5. since they wanted to charge nearly full price again to get the fix for the max6/7 update.

The 'seeds' are expensive also, at ~$35 us each, there is a nice selection however, so if you're in need of a specific tree type it can be good, as each 'seed' will generate different randomized trees as needed.

Xfrog trees:
look great, but they are based on a modeled branch, opacity mapped leaf method. so they are absurdly slow to render.

Also the max7 xfrog plugin is just a mesh importer, you dont get any kind of control over polygons from inside of max.

Xfrogtune: As an app for trimming trees down in polycount its great, for our purposes in MAX it is completely useless.. It has Wavefront OBJ and VRML, and .XFR, as export options, the obj importer for max, I think its a free one from habware.. doesn't respect the UVW mapping on the leaves.
The xfrog tune .xfr is not compatible with the xfrog 3.5 .xfr.. meaning you cannot open up a tree saved with tune in the main xfrog application or in the importer to 3ds max.

most of the xfrog library trees are in the range of 150 to 250k polygons. each. so while they look great, they are a bitch and a half to use in any number due to the hellish time of reducing the polycount.

Generally for larger forested scenes I will render xfrog tree's with GI in the scene lighting into billboard plane images, which will then feed into a Forest Pro layout object.

RPC:
They work, but there are generally alpha 'halo's around them due to the lower resolution they begin in. also take up a fair amount of Memory and disk space.


Currently i'm looking into speedtree, looking through their online library the trees look good, and the polycounts appear to be low enough to actually make the switch to Opacity mapped leaves useful, in that you can use more than 15 tree's without going insane. digging up a demo now.. we'll see how they stand up eh?


Lots of unedited brain dumpings on trees~ my experiences.

[Syclone1]

great info dave, much appreciated

-dave

[percydaman]

yeah nice info. we use (for the moment anyways) trees created in vue, then exported as 3ds. They look fairly decent. Certainly better then rpc trees. And you can determine polycount fairly well before exporting too.