Best trees for animations?

[jtiscareno]

Just a quick question:

What do you guys think is the best mesh trees for animation in vray?

Like we run into flickering issues with speedtree, and some others are just to damn big and heavy...

What is the best and quickest trees to render for animations, does not matter if the can move in the wind or not.

Thanks

[Guest]

im sure this has been posted somewhere, but i also would like peoples thoughts on what the best choice is for speed/looks ratio...

anybody?

greets,

Niels

[joconnell]

What kind of flickering issues? Are you using premade irmap and lcmaps? I got flickering issues from trees in an ad purely down to their size in relational to pixels - the leaves had so much tiny detail and variance in leaf direction they buzzed an awful lot so it was down to motion blurring in the end.

[Neilg]

Why not just crank the AA right up and turn off filtering?

edit: this is in relation to the flickering. We use bionatics, but they need a lot of work done to them.

[Dynedain]

speedtree has a lot of coplanar faces, which can cause nasty flickering

Bionatics is very heavy, and their licensing system is a pain for more than one workstation

I imagine XFrog is just as heavy as bionatics.

RPC looks horrible and has problems with GI rendering engines.



In short, there is no "good" tree plugin for max, they all have their drawbacks.

[joconnell]

Why not just crank the AA right up and turn off filtering?

Cos with camera moves, you get tiny details that are around a pixel big moving across screen - even a high quality adaptive subdivision has huge problems, it's more a limitation of broadcast than anything.

[gafl]

Try ARBORETUM...

http://perso.orange.fr/GLG3D/arboretum.html

The trees are good, very easy to use,very cheap.
Several free tools like vine or climbing vines on a wall or along a string.
All the plants use Vray Materials and they will recieve displacement
and refine option in the next version...(it is ready but not distributed yet)
There is no need of several licences for renderfarm...
The trunks are also textured in the next version...Trees may be animated too.

Well, there are other stuff but it is secret...and you know,
keep your secret secret...he,he !

Well several positif points to use ARBORETUM...

Have fun !
Gael

[Geertvdp]

Onyxtree has the ability to animate trees in the wind.

[Da_elf]

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ght=trees+poly

this was a while back. the trees used by olitech even though they are transparancy mapped are really low poly. ive used them before to great success

[percydaman]

be very careful of using alot of opacity maps in trees. We've gone to pure geometry trees here recently, because of how long it takes to render trees using alot of opacity maps. especially those that use entire branch structures with opacity maps. Also, you get GI shading in the crevices where the large poly's meet, that doesn't look correct. Vray will handle almost any amount of polys you can throw at it, but it quickly chokes on abundant use of opacity maps. Just a warning.

[Geertvdp]

I agree with Percy there.
Having lots of polygons isn't real problem for Vray.
You can always instance several types of trees and randomly rotate them.

Opacity mapping can be a real killer when several opacity maps are overlapping...

[tvc15]

I'm using Bionatics and they work well.
To reduce polycount I usually create young trees with less leaves and scale them up 20%. Then you can 'turn to mesh' the tree and make Vray proxies out of them.
My problem with them is that they create trees you'd see in a forest and not nicely pruned trees you'd find next your building. So it can take some time creating a tree you want.

[posterus]

we purchased an xfrog library recently and i am just now getting around to rendering them. they look great but as mentioned, render times could be better since they use opacity maps. anyone have some general tips on improving render times with xfrog trees? i thought i read somewhere that you can convert them to geometry? is there an easy way to do that? that method seems tedious.
-joe

[sea2stars]

Arbaro isn't half bad and it's free. I just wish there was more of an available library out there.

[DaForce]

If your using opacity mapped trees, turn the bitmap blur to 0.01 and turn the bitmap filtering off for the opactiy map. And I would also do the same fo for the diffuse map.
This will give you a significant speed increase plus your trees will look alot better.