Has anybody played with this yet?
It bothers me that they don’t have a single screenshot of the interface or it working - I think this might be the first tool like i’ve seen which doesn’t have any.
edit: they do, Maxon Welcomes Laubwerk to Their Expanding Family of Innovative Tools
looks good.
Looks interesting enough to try the freebie I guess…Thanks for the link Bobby
it has tree age, and season, for each specie. I tried rendering one out, and it was looking good, but really slow. When I have more time I’ll play with it.
Thanks Bobby, looks cool. It crashes a lot for me though whenever I try and render the tree. I’ll give it another go when I have more time.
I noticed their V-Ray material for the leaves (Acer sp.) has filtering enabled in the opacity map. Is thias still a “no-no” for V-Ray? No biggie, just curious if it might explain some of the slowness?
Well, I got to try it out finally, and it seems promising, although I don’t really “need” another tree plugin.
I made a 2000’ x 2000’ plane with (large scale noise added) and a V-Ray sun/sky (6 subdivisions.)
This is using three plant models in the free kit and scatterd with Forest Pro.
Went throught the mat files and removed opacity filtering and results were decent, I think…
RAM usage was about 3709M at peak
Best part was, no crashes, seems very stable.
Just a quick tip: you can remove the opacity filtering from Forest, with a single click, using Material->Optimize Materials.
Thanks, that’s a great tip!
Last I looked at this plugin, I got a very distinctive “Bionatix NatFX” feel from the topology and shape of the branches and foliage.
I think I’ll pass on this one.
Bionatix NatFXOh brother, do I remember that. I got sales calls daily, for weeks, before I dropped down $1,500. After I got it, tried to unsuccessfully work with it, nobody would answer my calls. It took me a long time to purchase another plug-in, and that was Autograss, in which the nightmare replayed itself. Now, Autograss is now working very well, but NatFX is long gone.
NatFX should be OFF the market: I think I used 2 of the more than 100 seeds I have a few times and they still don’t come close to ANY tree made with Onyx or coming from Evermotion, let alone Speedtree or GrowFX. I didn’t see an update since years, meaning they must be close to … a shutdown !!!
The trees/plugin is good although I am having a few issues actually rendering a tree!
Hopefully they can smooth the transitions between the branches and trunks…
Hi there,
I am CTO of Laubwerk and just found this thread, so I figured it might be nice to chime in. Just as a general note, we recently uploaded an update to version 1.0.2 to our download area. So if you grabbed the freebie and got an earlier version, please feel free to log in again and get the new download. It may fix a few issues that some you were having.
Having issues with actually rendering a tree is not good. It would be great if you could try the update above (if you haven’t already) and if that doesn’t help, please contact us via support@laubwerk.com with a few details (3ds Max Version, OS version, V-Ray version, simple example scene and screenshot if possible) so we can figure out what is going wrong for you.
Regarding the smoothing: I can’t give any definite date, yet, but that’s one thing that is very high up on our agenda, so please stay tuned.
Thanks for the heads up! Regarding the filtering: We weren’t sure about the details, because leaving filtering on hits the render time noticeably but switching it off leaves the regular Anti-Aliasing with the work to filter small detail. We changed this in an update and now switch filtering off by default, because the speed hit seemed to be the bigger issue (generally the render times seemed to be twice as long with filtering on for scenes with a lot of greenery).
That’s bad. It would be great if you could check our update and, in case it still happens, would contact us with details at support@laubwerk.com with a few details like already mentioned above (3ds Max Version, OS version, V-Ray version, simple example scene and screenshot if possible), so we can look into this.
We are working hard on making this product work well out of the box. Did you try switching opacity filtering off? Also please definitely try to play around with the LoD options. Even if you are so close to the tree, that using Leaf Amount (which removes leaves and scales the remaining ones to maintain density) is not an option, removing the finer branches can help a lot with the amount of geometry.
We’re really eager to make this a great product and hear as much feedback as we can get!
Best
Timm
looks very interesting. Downloading the demo now!
Heya
timm.dapper - this appear to be a great software to work with. I just had around 5 min with it so not sure how it will work in production environment.
However 1 thing that jumps out is the fact that I cant control the seed of tree to get different variations…
Another cool thing to see would be an option to have high detail in meshes soo..
Subdivide mesh to 1 mil + polygons, add displace moddifier with trunk texture and just push geometry out to produce really detailed trunk. Then make it a proxy and render high res looking trees.
Thanks, bye.
Hi Dariusz,
we did extensive testing and are confident, that it will do a good job. However, this is a young product and if you run into anything that doesn’t work as smooth as it should, we’re really eager to hear this so we can straighten out any bumps that may still be there. The same goes for feature requests, that will help with getting a smooth workflow.
This is true. While we use a fully procedural modeling system internally to build the models, we do not offer seeds at the moment. Getting seeds to produce believable results with all (or at least most) combinations of parameters is a very tricky thing to get right. Therefore we decided to have a fixed number (3 at the moment) of variations which are procedural and then hand-craft the last few steps.
That being said, we are working hard on getting more features for variation out to customers! I can’t tell you too much, but we may take a different route to get to the unlimited variation kind of functionality. Have you checked our research page? That may give you a rough idea of which direction our development efforts might take.
Have you checked the Subdivision Parameter? This allows you to add arbitrary detail to the trunk and branches. As far as I understand, this should enable you to get the results you were looking for? Of course, being able to have something like this working inside our product automatically is something worth thinking about.
Thanks for giving us this heads up. Please definitely don’t hesitate to get in touch with us (also directly at info@laubwerk.com) with any problems and suggestions you may have!
Best
Timm
Hi Timm, just seeing if there have been any developments on this plugin? Might be ready/willing to buy it soon…
Thanks
Hi voltron7,
we’re actively developing, another update is out soon. The biggest change here is additional support for CINEMA 4D and 3ds Max 2014, as well as lots of general bugfixes. The next update will bring some more features (e.g. on the material side of things) and workflow enhancements. Also the second Plants Kit is due pretty soon. Our FMX special (10% off) just ran out yesterday, but if you’re quick, we may extend it for you (send me a PM for that) 
Future service updates are free.
Later
Timm