State of the Art Trees for VRay/Max ?

[Joelaff]

What is the state of the art for trees that animate with wind these days? Ideally they would work with Forest Pack, but would blow realistically in the wind.

Of course they need to support VRay

Thoughts?

[fixeighted]

I don't think there are any specifically 'state of...' solutions....might be wrong though.
I'm using Speedtree for animated leaves/branches in an ongoing thing, as that seemed the best approach in the situation.
It exports efortlessly and was the only solution I found that could do what I wanted with degrees of control. It's cheap too, considering the power of its features.
Apparently it should work with FP but I haven't tried it.

[Joelaff]

Thanks for the info. How to you get this into Max? ABC or something else? Does it require its own special models to work?

[fixeighted]

It has an fbx exporter, so you can choose to export only the mesh, the mesh plus bones, mesh with just a point cache xml and some other options.
I had to do a massive hero tree so it was invaluable for not only a quick and easy to customise trunk/branches but also the great wind system which is tuneable.
You can build using the proprietary sytem or now with the latest update can import a custom base trunk and further expand that with their branching system, which looks pretty clever.

From all the options I looked at it seemed the simplest/best solution available...and for 17 quid for a month sub it's a no-brainer

[Joelaff]

Thanks again. Great info.

Always good to hear from someone who has used a tool in production rather than marketing materials, or just basic testing.

[^Lele^]

Speedtree is what i have always used for hero trees.
It's unmatched for mesh quality and flexibility (hand-drawing branches!), and you can easily do without opacity-mapped leaves, if you have the resources.
Your animated proxies will end up weighting a wee bit, however (after all, number of vertices times animation steps...).