Hi,
Does anybody have any good tips on ground cover? I have a scene the will require an almost forest floor look.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
“Scatter” with some nicely modelled organic stuff. Leaves, twigs, crap, etc., etc.. 
That, placed over a mesh with “noise modifier” applied to it and vray displace should do the trick.
Some thoughts… Been working on something similar lately. The bottleneck will be max’s ability to handle large object numbers. If you keep the vegetation / groundcover in a separate file, and xref it, you can work with proxies almost all the way. Just model some typical elements, and scatter based on the surroundings. Oh, and doing the scattering by hand isn’t always the best way to go, since you may tend to paint patterns. And don’t forget about opacity mapped planes. Works quite well too for smaller details.
Best regards,
A.
would most likely go with xref too … probably only populate the foreground with 3d models
and those in the midground and background will only have texture map and some nice
normals bump… those objects are quite small will not require so much attention if the
resolution wont show…
I believe this thread may help a little…
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=30154
Groud Cover
I followed that link, thanks. This guys work is something I like… any clue of the software?
http://www.vpii.com/residential.html
I saw his work over on vue 6, but I also read that vue doesn’t work with vray. Does anybody use vue?
Can you get Vue models into Max/Vray?
You can export Vue models as 3DS or OBJ and import in MAX, we tried with some of their trees and they don’t look any good, much better to use Onixtree or any other specific tree package.
The strength of Vue in rendering terrains is the procedural texture system, much better than MAX’s native, but if you import a terrain in MAX you cant use Vue materials …
There is a connection plugin that lets you render Vue scenes in max using MR, no VRay support. We tried to make some renders with this system but, in my opinion, it’s way too annoying and buggy to use. Guess someone else had better luck with it, I personally hate the way Vue works.
Vue
It seems for backgrounds it might be nice.
Proxy Painter is genius:
http://www.webalice.it/pietro.salerno0/index.html
You can use clone & align to replace scattered dummy objects with vray proxies.
Or use Particle Flow:
Proxy Painter
pardon my language, but holy crap! Proxy Painter is incredible, or at least the video tutorial is. This tool alone looks like it’ll solve a lot of my limitations. How many more of these “can’t live without” scripts are hiding out there?
Proxy Paint
I am devastated… it doesn’t work for me. I am running max 9 (86) and when I pick my button I see a cmd box pop open, but close just as fast. 
Proxy Painter
I tried another machine and it doesn’t work there either. The second machine is MAX 9 on XP64. Cruel joke showing me this script and it doesn’t work. 
Scatter
I did find this, which works, but doesn’t seem as nice.
http://3dcenter.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=82821
and this, which I haven’t tried yet.
http://highend3d.com/3dsmax/downloads/scripts/global\_utility\_plugin/Scatter-Tool-3749.html
Works exactly as expected here mate.
works really well infact. The 64k poly mesh limit is annoying tho.
script
Did you do anything special to install?
I had it working today, pretty cool but it was hard to control the flow rate. I was surprised it actually does work with vray proxies.
To install you need to make sure it is all in one folder in the root of C: named “proxypainter”
proxypainter
I just figured that out… try first, read instructions second 
. It works like a charm. I’ll have to see how that 64k per mesh thing limits you, but I see a work around in the readme file.
very “clever”
yeah i was going to mention reading the file that says ReadMeFirst.txt but thought.. well reading that would have been a given… maybe not hey
Atleast its sorted.. hehe