Maxwell Render

Only use instancing in cases where you need to because of a limited amount of RAM. It will definitely render slower using instances. It's a trade off.

Edit: Nice tree!

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Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

a bit weird though, that instancing slows the render so drastically.

the tree is indeed nice! the leafs look partly transparent. is this intended or am I seeing something wrong?

Thanks guys,

Hi Brian,

If I only have a few of them in a project, I do not instance them.

Hi Kami,
I'd say they look tranparent due to the make up of the Mesquite leaf. The leaves are made of tiny leaflets. Hers is my clip map I made from one of my Mesquites.



Aaron

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dual quad E5320's (1.8 ghz) (14.88 ghz total)
S5000 XVN SATA MOBO, 12 gigs of ram
win xp pro x64
Core i7 920 (2.66 ghz each core) 20 gigs of ram
Windows 7 Professional
Form-Z, Blender, VUE 9.5 and Maxwell Render
http://www.aaronsmithey.com

I also thought the leaves looked overly transparent!

If this is your clip map I can see why, not being b/w (0/255) you are getting this excessive transparency through the leaves.

I trialled some leaf tests with even lesser transparency, although one leaf with sun through may look sweet, when they overlay each other the foreground leaves in the shadow of background leaves still have excessive light through and looks wrong!

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Move your arse and your mind will follow!

That's just the image map I posted here. The clip map is constructed properly as an mxm with a b/w clip map. If I render this leaf by it's self it looks perfect with no transparency. It looks transparent because the leaflets are so tiny.

_________________
dual quad E5320's (1.8 ghz) (14.88 ghz total)
S5000 XVN SATA MOBO, 12 gigs of ram
win xp pro x64
Core i7 920 (2.66 ghz each core) 20 gigs of ram
Windows 7 Professional
Form-Z, Blender, VUE 9.5 and Maxwell Render
http://www.aaronsmithey.com

Cool!

But wow they seem so! I did read a thread the other days regarding use of tiffs as clips instead of jpgs as jpgs have artifacts of grey around the edges. On small leaves I've found a considerable difference!

Could it be possible at a distance pixel blending given the leaflets are so small the edges are being more blurred?

I too have found with Onyz I could spend a day trying to get a usable tree and still not be overly happy!

I've started some trials doing my own from scratch.

_________________
Move your arse and your mind will follow!

Richard,

I did use jpeg's so maybe I will try tiff's to see if it makes a difference. I like your leaf image. Thanks for the tip.

Aaron

_________________
dual quad E5320's (1.8 ghz) (14.88 ghz total)
S5000 XVN SATA MOBO, 12 gigs of ram
win xp pro x64
Core i7 920 (2.66 ghz each core) 20 gigs of ram
Windows 7 Professional
Form-Z, Blender, VUE 9.5 and Maxwell Render
http://www.aaronsmithey.com

you could also try using a second transparent layer with a weight map. this method is less error-prone.

I didn't know, that they have tiny leaflets. This explains the transparency. I need to check out some reference photos, trees like that don't exist, where I live

Hi,

I use Rhino and Rhino isn't good for high polycounts. My luck, I found the trees from www.VBvisual.com - I bought vol.1. The renderings at the webside dosn't looks so promising, because the quality lack of the used render engine, but I'm quite happy with the low poly trees...




The polycount is max 8000 per tree. Disadvantages: the price of the bundle is quite high and the textures are in TGA format only, but after converting to PNG and some color adjust it's fine for me. Only conifers are missing. I bought the DOSCH conifers, but that was a big mistake. Doe's somebody know a good resource for low poly conifers?

Alsoa low poly tree collection can be found from Marlinstudios:
http://www.marlinstudios.com/products/t ... efarm.html
But the collection seems to be based on phantasy trees, not real species:
http://www.marlinstudios.com/samples/samptreefarm.htm
And the top branches goe's upwards most - strange.
Doe's somebody used this trees?

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Rhino3D and more - 3D visualisation for designers and architects ... my gallery ... Freelance. ... www.simulacrum.de

Those trees you showed look pretty good from a distance. They look like they would be good to use as background distant trees.

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

Here an example in near distance.

_________________
Rhino3D and more - 3D visualisation for designers and architects ... my gallery ... Freelance. ... www.simulacrum.de

Not bad... Do they use large clipped planes with multiple leaves?

_________________
Brian Looney
Maxwell + RealFlow
http://lunatic-studio.com/
Help! I'm dispersing into a haze of probability!

This are the textures (different sets for different seasons):



I'm very curious which software was be used to create the trees.

_________________
Rhino3D and more - 3D visualisation for designers and architects ... my gallery ... Freelance. ... www.simulacrum.de

those trees indeed look very good. your rendering as well!
the only problem rhino has with large polycount is, that the viewpoint gets extremely slow. That's at least what I experienced... Is this the same problem you've got?

Yes, I know the slow down problem, but I found, working with meshes instead NURBS helps a lot to keep the RAM usage low and the viewport fast. So, for complex scenes I create meshes and keep the NURBS in an additional file.
MoI fast create homogeneous low poly meshes from NURBS. I wrote two little buttons scripts for exporting NURBS to MoI and reimport the mesh, so,the workflow is quite good.

_________________
Rhino3D and more - 3D visualisation for designers and architects ... my gallery ... Freelance. ... www.simulacrum.de