There are many threads (I’ve read alot of them) relating to trees for use with Vray, but I’d like some direction if possible.
I have to model a large residential project - 400+ apartments in four blocks - with an elevated view. I guess that I will need 3D trees and shrubs to make this look convincing. I have read that Onyx is probably my best bet, and would like to know if the “Onyx Garden Superbundle for Max” is the way to go, or is it overkill.
The price for this over garden suite is not a great deal more and I’d rather approach my boss once for 3D trees, than have to go back again in the near future.
Any experience or pointers would be much appreciated.
Get the garden superbundle, it’s worth getting all the plugins plus the Max plugin.
That said, if you have to do a large development like that, what you’ll need to do is model the trees in one of the Onyx modellers, then import them alone into Max and set the textures up, then convert it to a Vrayproxy and use that in the final model.
Onyx is definately a long-term investment. My employer bought a bunch of RPCs back in the 90’s and we kinda just kept using them out of ignorance…a few years back I started seeing a lot of images with stunning trees etc, found out it was onyx, put in the request, and havn’t had one regret over it since. The learning curve is a bit steep at first, and the documentation a bit overwhelming, but the payoff comes pretty quickly. One of my employers questions was specifically about the switch, and if it is something that would last for a while…the ability to create any type of plant pretty much guaranteed that.
We do the export to 3ds route as well because we have had no needs for the animation abilities as of yet.
I would definitely install the max plugin even if you don’t animate, as you can change random seeds, face counts, leaf densities, assign UVW mapping along the trunk, branches, and leaves all within MAX. Plus the files are tiny.
Once you use it, I think you’ll kick yourself for ever using the 3DS import method, IMHO.
as I told onyx sux badly as plug for max. you need to import one by one and convert to mesh or whatever. you can always try to send onyx support e-mail but I guess they’re on the way to woodstock so might not respond
thats a bit harsh. these people just want to make a living like the rest of us. I think the software is excellent and good value really. We have used it a lot but for creating proxies. I generally don’t use the max plugin because as usual, in max when you have a crapload of geometry in your scene, it runs terribly. I think this is more an issue with Max or limitations with our hardware that is the issue. Obviously if you have a bazillion (lot) polygons in your scene then max is going to die.
On a recent job the client asked for a peppermint tree and provided a photo of what they look like from down south in western Australia. I couldnt find a suitable premade tree anywhere and was forced to use the tree generator software from onyxtree - I was very pleasantly surprised with the results and ended up with a decent 100K polygon tree that i use on almost every job now as background filler but which is good enough for foreground as well. So id really reccomend the tree generation side of things in addition to the useful library of premades that come with the full package.
Just make sure you convert everything to proxies…but thats obvious!
To be honest, when I was initially researching trees when moving to max, onyxtree was really the only decent cost effective option that did’nt rely on opacity mapping for leaves. so for other people who cant decide or dont have the knowledge to do/find better, it is at least a good starting point.
Strange, never seen that before, but are you converting from the treestorm object directly, or from a pre collapsed mesh. I had some other problems when converting from the plugin directly, so it’ best to output from a normal mesh or poly object.
Ok, their soft is grate and I wouldn’t mind if they don’t want’t to support their softwre. But BE HONEST with your costumers. If they put on their website “contact support” it means that they offer help! They shopuld just write “you bought our product now f%$# off”. I prefer when peopel are honest with me and not sell me something and promise that in case of problems I can get in touch with them to solve it and then doesn’t respond to my e-mails at all!!! I wouldn’t even mind if they write back anything. again f%&$ off we can’t help you would be more understanding than no repsonse at all.
I save a tree from onyx as a 3ds file, then import in max, collapse, attached all into one object and create a vray proxy mesh.
I first thought that it’s something to do with screwed up pivots and bounding boxes so I tried resetting by XForm but nothing helped.
Funny thing is that it doesn’t affect all Onyx trees, just some of them
using onyx in max without the plugin cost you more time. with the plugin, you can simply open the onyx file, optimize the geometry settings, tell it you want to use UV settings, map image maps on the leaves, etc.. quickly. then convert it to a proxy.
