Just wondering which are the most effective tree and plant models to use with VRay advanced?
Having found excessive increases in render times with glass, we don’t want these times to go bananas when tree and plants are placed in the model ! The old trade off between render times and quality. is ever present.
We have looked at Bionatics, Speed tree, Xfrog etc but was just wondering what everyone else is have success with?
I’ve had pretty good luck with OnyxTREE (http://www.onyxtree.com). It’s quite expensive as far as a tree modeler goes but it gives you a lot of control. Which you’ll need because you have to massage the export values quite a bit to get just the right polygon count.
I’ve been having fair to decent luck with the Bionatics plugin, my main complaint is the price, the Max version is horribly expensive at 100 per procedural tree..
The quality is decent, they’re quite fast in geometry mode when you convert the materials into VrayMtl’s (Made a couple rough scripts to help edit and control their evil multi-sub materials if anyone wants.. some scripting knowledge required.) since they dont use opacity mapping at all. you can Billboard them, but personally i’m finding that functionality pretty limited, and finding it easier to use 1 or 2 full geometry tree’s instanced about..
One of the downsides being that as procedural tree’s, they have about 40% more polygons then if you convert them to meshes and weld the verts together.. Can be difficult to get a tree that fits your description, Basically need to recalc the tree to get a new version. the material coloration by default is a little odd and oversaturated, but that can be easily adjusted with a script that’ll work the RGB level down/up as needed..
Makes a good combination for foreground tree’s in conjunction with Forest pro or something simliar for distant tree’s.
Question about Onyx: Are those tree images opacity mapped leaves? And if so, how have you been able to adjust them to render in reasonable timeframes? (That and what do you consider reasonable timerframes.)
XFrog is pretty good too. I haven’t gotten into using it yet, but I am still playing around with it. Right now, I’m just box modeling, like Da-Elf. Here is an example image
Actually i heard a rumor once on efnet 3dsmax from someone who worked on harry potter that they were using my tut when making the tree for HP2. Not sure if he was pulling my leg but honestly ive searched and there really are no tutorials online like mine. Most are “create a cylinder and exturude out the branches” type of pine tree stuff