Best tree plug-in for max/vray?

[Giovanni]

After a false start, I am starting to appreciate my Speedtree plugin.

Early tests were simply unmanageably slow to render (in v-ray), so I was looking at multiple passes, etc.

Not worth it.

Instead, recently I manage to get decent results taking all trees out of the GI account, except they receive GI. This light them up decently, and do not take forever to render. Only problem: using Dreamscape, no Speedshadows are available.... So I am getting thin flat shadows when the sun comes to the right angle agains the bill boards...

Ideally, I could copy the tree, and make it "face" the light source instead of the camera, shadows only, of course...Anyone knows if it possible?

Much more tweaking haed (LOD, smaller leaves, good wind animation....etc.)


About TreeStorm, I am an old user, having bought the plugin for Electricimage years ago. However, besides the poly counts, I was always unhappy about the difficult leaves and trunk mapping limitations...

Is Storm for MAX better? Does it map leaves and trunk for you?

Good thread, lets keep going....


regards

gio

[Dynedain]

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?

We've been using speedtree and we haven't been happy with it for a couple reasons.

SpeedTree does modeled branches with opacity mapped "fronds" (clumps of leaves) so say bye bye to render times.

SpeedTree just loves to generate coplanar faces which usually means having to turn on the ray bias settings in Vray. Adjusting the tree in their editor so that it has less or no coplanar faces normally ends up with a nearly empty tree.

SpeedTree uses some kind of smoothing deffinition on the trunks and branches which doesn't work in Vray. So have fun with hard-edged polygonal trees.

SpeedTree uses Digimation's licensing system which is an aboslute pain in the ***. It's buggy, crashes, and is poorly documented. Installation and setup is far from intuitive.

SpeedTrees in max are special plugin objects. You can't export them to vray meshes.

[dbuchhofer]

Sweet, so we've pretty much established that all off the shelf tree solutions suck?

[percydaman]

haha you might have hit it on the head...

[RErender]

Is Storm for MAX better? Does it map leaves and trunk for you?

it does generate mapping

[shaneburger]

I've tried Onyx, Bionatics, SpeedTree, OnSite Trees... you name it. I have found that depending on the situation, none of them worked. Different type of rendering, different tree solution. SpeedTree and Bionatics says they have tested it with VRay, but I did not have as much luck in a production oriented setting, the kind without much time for tweaking or too many passes.

I used to use SpeedTree, but the shadow issue was a hassle (not using SpeedShadow created those thin shadows mentioned before). I have tried the method for shadowing that uses a second hidden tree for the shadow pass that has it's leaves facing the light, but found it seriously degraded render times when I had to duplicate so many trees. Not to mention the amount of set-up time it took. The entire concept of "speedshadow" is just dumb; I am not going to re-work my entire rendering and lighting workflow because they had to create a special shadow type just to make their trees cast shadows properly.

So... we need a tree solution that looks realistic up close, can be downsampled for polygon count when in a forest setting, is varied in terms of random seeds, does not overly complicate or modify our current rendering and lighting workflow, and behaves properly in a GI engine. Too much to ask?

Any chance the new "combined efforts" of ArchVision (RPC) and Bionatics is going to tackle this? Or are we to expect the same crap for a few more years.

Maybe we should make our own? Anyone know programming?

[RErender]

Any chance the new "combined efforts" of ArchVision (RPC) and Bionatics is going to tackle this? Or are we to expect the same crap for a few more years.

Doubtful, as far as I can tell their 3.5 D is just geometry that requires a plugin to use/see ...

Onyx-->VrayProxy is a pretty strong solution.

[dbuchhofer]

Dear Mr. Buchhofer,

We do not have demo.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,
Customer Support

OnyxGARDEN
*
* *
* * Onyx Computing

Shame.. it almost looked promising.

[czoog]

Any chance the new "combined efforts" of ArchVision (RPC) and Bionatics is going to tackle this? Or are we to expect the same crap for a few more years.

Onyx-->VrayProxy is a pretty strong solution.

Agreed, this has been working pretty well for us.

[dlparisi]

Can anyone confirm that a relatively complex Onyx tree will render faster than an opacity mapped Xfrog tree of similar size? What kind of render times are we looking at for each (can you include a screenshot)? As Onyx doesn't have a demo it makes it a little hard to do a comparison. Thanks.

David

[TRGraphics]

Does anyone have an onyx tree they can share for testing purposes? I'm interested in the program as well, but I have never tried to use even a single tree of theirs.

[pdvista]

bionatics works well on vray? hehehe ....but first you need some luck because they have a lot of problems when it runs on 3dsmax........every two or three changes on the tree...........error...error.....error.......It´s horrible......I have NATFX and the workflow is very tedius and most of their seeds make horribles plants........

one month ago They call me to use the "new natfx demo"......and I can see that their sotfware have a lot of bugs, when you pressCTRL-Z , MAX said GOODBYE.....and long nights i was thinking for the reason of this......Finally I uninstall natfx and no problem again.........I mail to support team of bionatic and they told me.......-We knew that........try this new version now.........and i thought for myself"you know that? and you didn't tell me?.....bad person....and bad policity"....they dont have forums.......why?......too many bugs, too many work for the moderator....hehehehe.

this is my experience

[Clifton Santiago]

I've found Onyx trees work best in most situations. I'll still use Itoosoft Forest for backgrounds.

The trick with Onyx is to learn their tree modeler well enough to get the results you want.

Once you get an Onyx tree into Max, you need to enable the UV coords so you can map/color the branches and leaves as desired.

If you need many trees, just use 2 or 3 random seeds and instance them around. You could proxy them as well, or instead.

To provide enough variation in the instances, rotate and scale the trees differently.

When you get hundreds of instances, you will need to display as box to save your graphics card. As long as they are instanced, you shouldn't get high-polygon memory errors.

[TRGraphics]

Are the onyx trees 100% geometry or do they use opacity maps for the leaves.

[Clifton Santiago]

Actually, they are both.

The default leaves are geometry. In the tree modeler you can choose from about 9 different shapes. But if you start by modifying a particular type of tree, say a Tilia Cordata (lime/linden tree), it will already have the leaf geometry most resembling the actual leaf by default.

Then, when you insert the tree into Max, you can either keep that leaf geometry, or you can choose to assign a leaf and opacity map, in which case it will switch to a "plate" for mapping purposes.