What solution is available for animated trees? Looking for something that is a bit more then just random animation on the leafs, the branch and so on should move a little bit too. Also I would prefer a 3dsmax solution.. No idea if this is even possible.
Hope some of the arch viz guys out there can help me.
/Thomas
we used treestorm. they got wind animation that actually looks pretty nice. Would be damn nice if there will be a way to convert them to animated proxies 
Anyways the wind controls are pretty nifty and affect the different parts differently.
Kind Regards,
Thorsten
second tree strom here. You can cache the mesh, might take a try or two though…leaves can get messed up…animated proxies are coming according to Vlado :)…can’t wait 
Old thread, but why start a new one???
Now that we have animated proxies, can TreeStorm trees with wind animation simply be converted into animated VrayProxies?
yes you can, its nice and easy
Right, I’ve given it a try with a resonably high poly maple tree, and the actual conversion to an animated VRayProxy is nice and easy (though the proxy is around 2GB!). However, when I play back the VRayProxy, the tree animation is not smooth all the way through: it occasionally jumps about a bit and looks very unnatural. I will render out the sequence and see if it renders the same, but I am not hopeful.
Unfortunatly, it is difficult for me to play back the un-proxied version in a viewport as the poly count is too high.
Has anyone had this kind of issue with treestorm trees? I can email you the treestorm onyx file if you like…
OK. It seems it may just be the way that VRayProxies are displayed in the VP.
good to hear you have it figured out!
be careful with the proxy sizes over networks, I have found that sometimes leaving key trees as treestorm trees can be far more memory efficient than proxies
I had wondered about that. Are there in fact any benefits to creating proxies out of them?
way less memory use
Regards,
Thorsten
I assumed that TreeStorm would have some pretty clever functionality that would keep the memory useage low. Evidently I am wrong.
(I’ve just done a small test. Using 4 identical VrayProxy files (around 2GB proxy files), the average render time is 8:24. Using four TreeStorm trees however, each with a different random seed, the average render time is 3:06. This suggests that using VrayProxies is significantly slower.)
yeah. but try to render with 200 storm trees then try to render with 200 vray proxies
Vlado has stated that Max instances can be faster…but proxies will rarely run you out of memory
Fair point. My scenes are unlikely to have that many trees. I was aware that proxies may be slower. I didn’t appreciate by how much!
As above, I was aware that these points had been made. I thought we’d be talking a few percentage points though: not 50% or so!
It now makes me wonder about ForestPro. I had assumed that I should just use ForestPro on proxies of bushes ‘for safety’, but I need to try by letting ForestPro do the instancing and see how much quicker it is (if at all).
Im interested to see what kind of results you managed to get with treestorm. Are they comparable to something like the animations featured in “The Third and Seventh” ?
Yes - If there is one tutorial I’d like to see it would be how to animate those trees with leaves like he did!
I would love to read the tutorial too, if there is one..
Vue ? Any1 try it ? U could match cameras/ either render in vue / or render in max… should be pretty easy and good..
