Realistic Vegetation

[mariome]

Please somebody tell me how to put realistic vegetation in v-ray for sketchup because the trees and vegetation in sketchup are too limited and not realistic..or tell me a trick to make them more realistic please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Dangeroux]

Re: Realistic Vegetation

Wow, you want someone to explain one of the most complex areas of 3D visualization in a few lines?

OK, here goes- take lots of very good quality photos of trees, plants and ground textures in good light at different times of the year- edit them for hours in Photoshop so the backgrounds are completely masked out (I reckon about 1 - 2 hours per tree if there's a lot of garbage in the background), convert the backgrounds to 100% transparent, save as png format and use as a texture to make trees in sketchup, then save a desaturated black and white (no grey) copy in PS and set it as a clipmap in VRay. If you set the trees to "face me" in sketchup they'll always face the Vray camera which is pretty neat. For ground textures I just colour range select the areas in PS and paste in and adjust photos of ground textures taken from similar eye heights.

But honestly, if you're at the stage of still using sketchup's bundled tree components I'd expect to have to invest several weeks learning more about CAD modelling and visualization in general before expecting any "quick fix" solutions to photorealistic or near-photorealistic rendering, especially of natural features. There's a reason a lot of commercial visualization firms still just Photoshop in trees and vegetation at the end.

[thomthom]

Re: Realistic Vegetation

Because Sketchup doesn't handle huge amount of geometry well, which vegetation often demands, I add it post-render in Photoshop. It saves me rendering time and keeps the SU file manageable.

[mariome]

Re: Realistic Vegetation

thanks...i use photoshop too but i thought that i could use sketchup in a better way to do this, but thanks...