animated vegetations

[fraggle]

Hello,
I'm wondering how to handle, the most natural way, trees , herbs, flower with max and Vray as I have never done that before. It's for a short 2 minute movie about walkthrough in a park, as much realistic as possible. What about Evermotion trees model, can it be easily animated?
Should I use a plug in or should I do it by hands or in post prod? of course, I will have to use proxy and I will have to render in HD with a farm.
Thanks to share your experience and to advice.

[Morne]

You can do minor stuff with flex modifier and wind spacewarp. BUT that's not going to look as good as EXlevel's GrowFX. It's a mission to learn to create the plants however
http://exlevel.com/
Or you can use the ONYXTree with treestorm (but I'd rather try GrowFX)
http://onyxtree.com/stormx.html

Or you could try speedtree
http://www.speedtree.com/

Or VUE (Lot of users say it's too unstable apparently)
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/

I'd say out of all of them, GrowFX from Exlevel is probably the best bet

[fraggle]

thanks,
Should I have to convert all the mesh create with growFX (without loosing the animation) to proxy or the plug is already provided with a kind of proxy management system?

[DPS]

They have a few plants that you can download as a starting point but Growfx doesnt handle the proxies.

It's a good plugin.

[ajroane]

You can instance GrowFX plants over a surface, all within the GrowFX interface. From my tests, though, it doesn't handle memory effectively. It's a great plug-in, but the built-in scattering is meant as an aid to create models, not landscapes. So, yes, you would still need to create animated proxies out of the GrowFX models.

Best,
Andrew

[fraggle]

Thanks,
According to this thread
http://www.ronenbekerman.com/forums/...imation-3.html
it is 1,5 Gig of ram for this rendering
http://vimeo.com/60081264#at=0
And 20 minute per frame, just insane, maybe it was done on a Pentium 4!

I download the trial of GrowFX, the wind animation is easy but material/shader are not looking astonishing in close up, but I believe you can't get speed and quality at the same time.
Looking around for Vue, but it seems to be a nightmare to merge it in max (google it).
GrowFX seems to be the cheapest anyway, need to find out if it can work with multiscater instead of ForestPro.

[svetlozar.draganov]

If Maya is an option you could build all sort of animation trees/herbs/flowers with Paint FX, then converted them to polygons, bake the animation and sent the scene to 3DSMax or export it to VrayProxy.
Maya's Paint FX textures aren't great so for a better quality yo may replace them with better hi-res textures.

[DPS]

but material/shader are not looking astonishing in close up..

I think this is more down to time and effort to get the desired amount of detail.

Plant factory also looks cool but I've not tried it.

[fraggle]

thanks for the info, but maya is not an option.

If Maya is an option you could build all sort of animation trees/herbs/flowers with Paint FX, then converted them to polygons, bake the animation and sent the scene to 3DSMax or export it to VrayProxy.
Maya's Paint FX textures aren't great so for a better quality yo may replace them with better hi-res textures.

[fraggle]

thanks,
the idea was to get away with shader included in the pack to gain time.
Plant Factory is from the Vue editor (e-on) and due to the number of people complaining about vue into max, I thing it is better to stay away from it.

I think this is more down to time and effort to get the desired amount of detail.

Plant factory also looks cool but I've not tried it.