Hi to all!
I’m Leonardo from Italy.
I’m a newbie on this forum, and I have already a question:smile:
I need to render realistic vegetation (expecially european trees) in my renderings, and I want to do it in animation too.
What do you use for do this?
What external package work finer with vray1.5 and 3dsmax2009?
Xfrog/onyx whatever trees (the models arent as important as most people seem to think, so long as they’re not awful)
Convert to proxy and instance round your scene
And the most important bit - spend ages getting your materials right, tweak the colour balance and hue of your leaf materials to get it looking as natural as possible.
Hi and welcome to the forums!
What I can suggest regarding trees/vegetation - no opacity mapped leaves, stick to geometry. I’m using onyx trees, and they’re fine for the most part - especially when viewed from distance. If you on the other hand want to do a close-up of the tree - go for hi poly models, like the ones from Evermotion.
here are some examples, literaly thousands of trees, render times about 6-7 minutes 
onyx trees, all instanced as proxies, with translucency and such.
the last three are frames from an animation, hence the motion blur.
Thank you both:smile:
I’m not worryed by render time because Vray is very very very fast:smile:
but what about the interaction of onyx and xfrog with vray? (material settings) and 3ds max (importing, plug-in, management, instancing)?
The trees must to be set-up externally to 3ds or are embedded?
about onyx - the trees are ‘designed’ in an external aplication (ONYX TREE) and then imported via plugin (TREE STORM) into 3dsmax. Then You can play with materials, wind animation and stuff like that. The tree can then be proxied (if needed).
Materials can be tweaked on proxies themselves, because the material structure is intact - apart from mapping, unfortunatelly You cannot map a proxy - it keeps mapping from it’s original object.
i dont know if it still has a problem but the x-frog import plugin was really slow when compiling the scene for render. i used to just convert to editable mesh and then render
How do you implement you transclucency? Do you add volume to your leaves or do you have some sort of texture based work around?
vray2sided mat works very nicely for this on one sided leafs