as for contacting onyxtree about that, why would i do that? What good would it do? if i thought they cared, i might do that but my past experience with them leaves me to conclude that it would be a waste of time.
Why ? Well, because you paid for the software and support and you got serious problems with it, thats why Since i dont have those problems i never contacted them so i dont know whats their response time and if they are helpful, but i certanly wouldnt hurt to contact them. Over here you wont get much help and i dont think writing a short email explaining your problems is a waste of time, just count together the minutes it tooks you to write all these post in this thread and still you dont have any help at all - but at the end its up to you…
Ok, I’ve got treestorm installed now but I’m don’t understand how I’m supposed to work in the way you’ve indicated with vertex colour.
Could you briefly describe the workflow you use with treestorm to produce nice vray proxies?
I’m assuming you dont apply uv to the treestorm model… retaining the vertex colour data. Is that all you use to colour your leaves? or do you mix the vertext colour with a leaf bitmap?
Do you usually using the standard leaves that treestorm produces or do you have a library of your own leaf objects that you use to replace with?
http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/VI/default.asp → Week 24
If i use vertex colors or bitmaps depends on the tree, i prefer bitmaps for broadleafs, vertex color for palm trees and conifers.
About the leafs, the standalone version comes with a few leafs and i also like to use some of the xfrog leaf textures for my onyx trees.
Patrick,
If you want to use the vertex colors, tag the model with the max material sampler to load the existing material that is assigned to the tree. They will all be standard materials. switch them out for vray material. in the diffuse slot of the vray material, select the “output” from the max material selction then pop the “vertex” map into the output map. Onyxtrees vertex colors are almost always too saturated. This will give you some control over them.
mh
thanks mikeh,
I’ve got the map-layers plugin so I’m thinking of layering the vertext colour channel over a real leaf texture… it might add some nice colour variation.
So after looking at the video from VI, it looks like you still need to use opacity maps for your leaves when using treestorm with broadleaf trees/bushes… at least thats the way he does it.
Curiously, I did a quick test of opacity vs non-opacity mapped leaves. Using the same mesh the opacity mapped leaves rendered in 1:41m, non-opacity mapped leaves rendered in 1:50 !? Not exactly what I expected. Perhaps the result would be more as expected(ie slower with opacity mapped leaves) with a more complex scene.
It seems to me that if I’m having to use opacity maps anyway, why shouldnt I go ahead and use plates with some nice random curvature to boot?
One other issue… I know that to speed up opacity mapped leaves I should switch off the map filtering for the opacity map. I’ve also switched off the filtering in the diffuse map. Am I right in thinking that vray’s DMC sampler will counter the lack of sampling in the texture maps? Is the only downside of this approach the risk of flickering in animations?
If I make the treestorm tree with plates and sub-objects, I can no longer convert the damn tree to a mesh! Is it just me?
Does this mean I need to make a copy of the tree without plates, convert to poly, delete the leaves, then extract the leave-plates from the other copy and attach the two meshes together? what a pain…
New workflow?..
- create treestorm tree_00
- create copy tree_00_copy
- convert tree_00 to editable mesh
- convert tree_00 to editable poly
- select all leaves on tree_00 and delete
- change params of tree_00_copy so that leaves are plates/sub-objects
- delete tree_00_copy branches
- attach tree_00_copy leaves to tree_00 branches
- convert to vrayproxy
Am I missing something here? It seemed to be a bit more straightforward importing 3ds’s…
It is more straightforward to do 3ds, but what I don’t think you have yet done in your description is after you bring the tree in to MAX through treestorm, select it, hit the modify tab, and you have a new random seed option under the parameters tab - so you can generate variations of the tree in MAX (way better than 3ds-ing a bunch of different trees IMHO)
If you hit the adjust button above it (under the polygons tab) than you’ll get a bunch of new options…including the ability to turn off levels of branches, reduce the number of leaves, ADD UVWs to various levels and convert the leaves to sub-objects.
So sadly while you do need to undergo many of the painful steps you’ve described, you can convert directly from a treestorm object to a vrmesh file without making it an editable poly or mesh beforehand.
I am surprised by the render times obviously, and the only thing that I can say is that geometry would still be preferable to me so we’re not faced with AO pass problems later on.
Treestorm is nice, has a few very useful features over the standalone 3ds export. However it’s unstable as hell. One of the reasons we keep an instance of max 8 on our workstations is treestorm, as fas as we experienced, the max 8 release seems to be the most stable one. To be honest, treestorm for max 2008 sux big time.
And maan, how I wish the development of treestorm was a bit more, how should I say,… “dynamic”. The generator itself changed very little in the past few yers, and it’s missing some small but useful features. Imagene what you could do if you could color leaves depending on distance from the trunk, etc…
oK…here’s my workflow for creating trees that are mesh leaves only…not plates.
1.google images and find suitable leaf (that you can’t get out of stand alone onyxtree) and flower (if i want to have the flower as part of the model)
2. crop and adjust the image in pshop then bring the image into acad and trace over the image of the leaf.
3. import the cad leaf into max, convert it to a mesh and map it and bend it to suit. Posssibly make a leaf cluster of it. Save the file. Reset and start a new max file.
4. bring in the treestorm tree in max, go to modify panel and turn the leaves into objects.
5. substitiute the objects for the leaf(s) and or flowers
6. observe that the orientation is probably wrong or that the scale is wrong and go back to the leaf or flower and change their orientation (this means that once the orientation or scale is changed that i make a box (or whatever you want), attach the box to the revised leaf…thus giving the leaf its properties…and then get rid of the box)
7. open up tree and bring in revised leaf.
Now here is the pissy part…Onyxtrees with objects can’t be turned into a mesh. So you have to detach the leaves and convert them to mesh. Import a 3ds version of the tree, move it to the same location as your treestorm tree, delete its leaves and delete the trunk, branches etc of the treestorm tree. NOW you can convert the whole thing to a mesh that will be safe to use in your scene.
It seems almost intentional on Onyxs part that this dissasembling of their trees is difficult and results in corrupted files. It would seem that they don’t want their trees to be available without their plugin being installed. This is just my guess.
The problem with this is that you have to get the trees to a mesh level, unattached to treestorm, to properly map the trunk and branches.
Yep, its a pain in the proverbial.
btw, you could avoid using 3ds mesh if before you make the leaves into objects, make a copy of the treestorm tree. You can then convert that one to mesh, delete the leaves(select by ID), and be left with the branches in the correct location for the leaves you make with the rest of your process.
I’ve just given up using treestorm… crashing every 2 mins is a recipe for an early grave! .. changing the seeds for the different elements in broadleaf doesnt take more than a few seconds, and max is now stable as a rock (albeit a rock balancing on the edge of a precipice)…
I think it is a really good guess, and the real tip off is the 3ds export dialog when they tell you it is illegal for you to distribute the 3DS file you just made.
As far as workflow…The one thing I would add is when you try to break off the leaves after you’ve removed them from their parent (the trunk/branches) attach them to another object, then delete that objects original element, otherwise the leaves’ll retain some kind of relationship to the tree and crash you every time you attempt to delete them.
The support or rate of development ain’t great, but I think that is what happens when one company has a virtual monopoly in a very small, minimally profitable niche. Either someone with a similar passion needs to give them a run for their money, or landscape architects need to get serious about doing computer renderings that aren’t collages so the market expands.
I’ve only had to contact them once, and I called them, and spoke with someone immediately, not even placed on hold…never tried emailing them, though. Generally, I try not to use email as a means of “first contact” since their security might block an unknown address and all that jazz…
well…apparently this time my email finally got a response. here it is below..
mh
Thank you for your email. We are getting feedback from some users where they say that Tree Storm x64 is unstable and crashes the system. The problem we have is that this does not happen on our x64 system. We repeatedly ask those customers to send us a sample scene which exhibits the problems and a step by step instructions which lead to at least one of those reported crashes. But we never get that from those customers and we are left in the air. This is the main reason we have not been able to do much so far. We have even sent a copy to Autodesk’s developer support lab and they could not find anything either. So, we are dependent on your support here. Please, send us a sample scene that exhibits problems and accompany that with a step by step instructions which lead to the crash so we can test it on our system.
We want you to know that it is in our utmost interest to resolve those problems as quickly as possible and we are certainly not dragging our feet about it. Thank you for your support!
Spoke with onyxtree (Pjer, i think) and we came to the conclusion that possibly everything i was trying to do with the trees didn’t require disassociating the treestorm trees from treestorm (Which is where treestorm started crashing). So now i am working on them as associated trees and not editable meshes. So far the only crash i had was when i tried to clone 8 of them at once. max didn’t like that…but it didn’t corrupt the files and didn’t corrupt max.
Apparently if you want to modify onyxtrees in max, you are better off importing the 3ds versions from the stand alone onyxtree. they don’t crash max at all.
I still like treestorm and am going to see how far i can push it.
mh
Since i dont have those problems i never contacted them so i dont know whats their response time and if they are helpful, but i certanly wouldnt hurt to contact them. Over here you wont get much help and i dont think writing a short email explaining your problems is a waste of time, just count together the minutes it tooks you to write all these post in this thread and still you dont have any help at all 
