Better than Itoo Forest

[im.thatoneguy]

Only Z-issue I have is that you can't use a VrayDisplacement mod to place your trees. Which means you have to create masssssssive geo meshes for scenes and ensure the two never get out of sync. About 30% of some of our renders can go into the high poly surfaces for iToo. Would be nice if iToo could sample a displacement map and operate on the same general math that Vray Displacement uses for terrain to sample the Z-position for every tree at forest-creation. That could save us 100m+ unique polies in some scenes and produce more accurate results when our terrain is nicely displaced down to just a few million polies thanks to view-dependent displacement.

[flino2004]

when I saw that plugin I thought was the FP version by itoosoft. .... it's identical. another plugin that I just installed is Ivy generator for Sketchup and it's way much better than the max version and stable.

[super gnu]

Only Z-issue I have is that you can't use a VrayDisplacement mod to place your trees. Which means you have to create masssssssive geo meshes for scenes and ensure the two never get out of sync. About 30% of some of our renders can go into the high poly surfaces for iToo. Would be nice if iToo could sample a displacement map and operate on the same general math that Vray Displacement uses for terrain to sample the Z-position for every tree at forest-creation. That could save us 100m+ unique polies in some scenes and produce more accurate results when our terrain is nicely displaced down to just a few million polies thanks to view-dependent displacement.

cant you just control the z-offset with a greyscale map? youd need to tweak the range so it matched your displacement... or you could do the scattering on a displaced mesh then (im thinking out loud here, not at my workstation) turn off the z-linking and swap for a new non-displaced base mesh?

basically im sure there is a way to do it.

[im.thatoneguy]

cant you just control the z-offset with a greyscale map? youd need to tweak the range so it matched your displacement... or you could do the scattering on a displaced mesh then (im thinking out loud here, not at my workstation) turn off the z-linking and swap for a new non-displaced base mesh?

basically im sure there is a way to do it.

*smacks forehead* works perfectly. I didn't realize you could drive that with a map. Does require a small bit of math conversion, amount: 100*displacementAmount/treeHeight. I wouldn't mind though iToo automagically doing the calculations internally on Vray Displacement Mods. Would be far more robust.

[joconnell]

What are you using to generate your environment landscape maps Gavin? I've to do a few space bits soon and need to pick something up!

[im.thatoneguy]

World-Machine.com is the terrain generator I wished all terrain generators were.

[joconnell]

Great. I bought a license of geocontrol a few years back but I think it's been bought by another company. That's a good endorsement of world machine though so I'll give that a run - cheers!

[Bathyscaph]

World Machine is a great tool.

Something to look into as well, is a companion tool for World Machine called GeoGlyph:

http://www.quadspinner.com/

There is a free version available so you can try it out. Essentially, it manages many of the myriad tool settings for you so that you can work in a more artist-directed way.

[joconnell]

Much appreciated steve - that helios thing they produced for ozone looked really promising, they seem to really know what they're doing!

[super gnu]

that helios thing looks great! but i cringe at the idea of having to buy that *and* vue just to get some nice skies going on. somebody needs to sort it out if they would only produce a version of helios that works directly with vray and skips vue entirely....

[joconnell]

The guys in e-on appear pretty clueless about their customers. I bought a copy of Vue years ago and only after you purchase you get access to the customer forum you'll see the huge amount of people complaining about it! They don't seem that committed to making really solid software, they've been bought out recently too?

[im.thatoneguy]

The guys in e-on appear pretty clueless about their customers. I bought a copy of Vue years ago and only after you purchase you get access to the customer forum you'll see the huge amount of people complaining about it! They don't seem that committed to making really solid software, they've been bought out recently too?

Have you ever tried to move a Vue license server to a new machine? Hope you don't have any work to do for a few weeks to a month for the process to sort itself out. We installed a new domain controller/license server a year ago and we still don't have vue working yet because it's such a huge pain in the ass. And why bother really? Between ForestPack, WorldMachine, Vray's 3.3 aerial Perspective and FumeFX you can create infinitely better renderings without having to touch its Bryce3D era interface.

[super gnu]

unfortunately it still does the best skies and clouds. ozone would be a good compromise, but (AFAIK) that still doesnt allow "hero" clouds..

[im.thatoneguy]

cant you just control the z-offset with a greyscale map? youd need to tweak the range so it matched your displacement... or you could do the scattering on a displaced mesh then (im thinking out loud here, not at my workstation) turn off the z-linking and swap for a new non-displaced base mesh?

Found the ultimate problem with this approach. You can't directly use Normal settings and such for scattering. It can be worked around by generating 'steepness' maps blended with the displacement map and some output curves but it would be nice if forestpack did that internally so that all of its tools function normally.

Another nice tool would be to generate a splat-map for distant forests that would use a color/normal map and generate a texture map based on the tree scatter algorithm to render sub-pixel trees as a normal map.

[super gnu]

is that the case? i thought you could map the offsets from the target surface..? the transform offsets you can definitely use with all the other forest features.