Decided to do a quick stress test animation with forest lite…
Took about 2 days to set up the whole sequence. Theres 3 layers of forest - grass, shrubbery & trees.
The grass has about 600k proxies scattered (it goes right around the lake, about 25m deep from the shore), the shrubs about 30k proxies and the trees about 40k - I worked out that this makes 24 billion polys in total. :lol:
Not a bad little plugin. 
looks great, congrats…
…its just a bit shame that forrest lite cannot scatter on modelled terrain but only on flat surfaces…would like to try how it behaves on elevated terrain b4 i decide to buy it.
Very nice test!
I like the far away shots a lot.
I cant imagine it’d screw it up, if they did let you do that there would be no reason at all to buy it either.
We’re on track for getting it the second we get a job that actually needs it.
yep…true and fair enough
hey, looks very great, especially the last one ;o)
Did you manage to do a animation fly-through ? 
And that’s for sure, the day I have a job where this plug-in is necessary, I will jump on it ;o)
Yeah - it’s rendering as we speak, those are stills of the path from an ‘every 100th frame’ test i did.
We’ve got another job going on at the moment with loads of animation so this doesnt exactly take priority - it may not be done until next week.
I think if you go their website you’ll see examples. If worst comes to worse, just use the “glue” tool once you’ve got your plants scattered. That’s what i do when i’m hand placing them.
mh
Great job cubicleganster ;). If you want to publish it in our User’s Gallery, please tell me. I will be delighted to include some images or a link to YouTube, as you like.
There is not performance loss using surfaces, if you are worried about that. You can see Forest placing trees over a surface in real-time here:
There are more videos and tutorials at our website showing Forest Pro features.
I almost forget it… a good trick to create a grassy field without using a huge number of instances:
- Using Forest, create a grass sample with some hundreds of blades
- In Display rollout, Change “Mode” parameter from “Automatic” to “Meshes”
- Create a new Forest object, taking previous sample as Custom Object. On this, set Mode to “Automatic” (default value)
… and you get a hierarchy of two Forest objects working together. Adjust parameters as desired
Done some fisheyes, because nobody ever does fisheyes anymore
I didnt realise the grass was so patchy…
That’s great, look forward to seeing the finished animation. Would like to see shallow depth of field right up at the leaf and ladybird, increasing as you pull back. The far away shots are really convincing.
Is your lake animated? If so, how?
It’s not in that, but its in the process of being animated.
the bump is 2 different normal maps and a noise set to turbulence, layered in various mix maps - the normal maps were keyframed to move along the sufrace (one slightly faster than the other) and the noise was animated gently doing it’s thing.
Looks good for being a standard material, but theres still some work to do.
Great shots cubiclegangster. Thumbs up
i didn’t realize that forest lite is a free plugin…that’s awesome…
one question for forest pro users/developers: i see an option to random tint the material, which is disabled for the lite version.
does this option work with vray proxies? IMO that would be crucial for a realistic forest. i think vray scatter can do that.
Yes. It works with all type of objects and proxies.
The only requirement is to inherit your materials from “Forest Material” plugin. You can use all type of materials as base, including VRay native types.
Are there any plans to add some kind of fancy sprite shading to billboard trees, like what’s available in games and Afterburn, etc.?
Fantastic work cube!
I’m going to have to have a play with this 
Not for the moment. Most of these shaders, as Normal mapping, requires a 3D object to pre-process data from it. But if you have the object, is better to render it directly instead using a billboard.
Well it depends. It would surely be a lot faster as billboards, and is satisfactory for a lot of background work.