Heavy foliaging faking it ...techniques needed

[uncon]

That sounds cool, you have to show it to us when you are done.

My suggestion is to model the branches and leaves you will pass close to and use cards with clip maps on sparse tree geometry. You can make cool trees with that treecage plugin off of flay. The high-rez tree branches that you make to pass close by can be rendered off as a side view for constructing trees that will be far away. For far far away trees use two polygon cards with trees on them either in an X (if they need to be) or one facing into the scene.

I would also suggest using cards for the leaves with clip maps on them, flat is good but slightly curved works better if you are getting close. Of course the type of tree will determine what works best.

[Crocodilian]

Its helpful to think of which trees have to be modelled in 3D --because the camera will pass through them-- and those where photomapping techniques will suffice.

Dennis Brkla has great photomapped "image hoses" for Painter and Photoshop which are great for painting foliage

www.gardenhose.com

[adrencg]

Hey guys i need some techniques for creating a heavy forest/brush line surround a water

My focus is not on the water just faking the density of the foliage

The camera will be required to travel through some areas of the forrest or come close near to the brush lines

How can i fake this? and keep the poly count loo

Best way to go about modeling it...should i try to use mass geomtry for the leave and fake the apperance of the leave?
If you can afford it, get HD_instance.

I used it recently to make an entire jungle scene with HEAVY foliage. I had several different plants and trees, then used a version of the terrain in another layer to make them conform to the shape of the ground. The scene is practically empty, but it looks thick with plants and trees when rendering.

Mike

[Ziah]

hmm adren i like the idea of it how does it work exactly im not interested in buying just wonder what it really is

I think i will go about it with a combiniation of clip maps and geometry thats the best i got as of now unless i can find a cheaper way to do what hd instance seems to achieve .......from the look of it it replaces objects with its own low res replacment or clone using nulls a method simlar to pfx not sure if it use geometry or what but thats gives me another idea as well might i say



Can anyone tell me what exactly does fx link /browser do when u use pfx / nulls to clone objects ?? does it just mimic geormetry in layout or are they some form of a stand in?


the only thing im worried about is the shrub line around banks the will have to do some close ups etc as im hoping to have some animation inside of them( lil wind blowing that is)

[dragon_little]

the giant font, and ugly color you use, to ask your questions look terribly awful

c

[adrencg]

hmm adren i like the idea of it how does it work exactly im not interested in buying just wonder what it really is

I think i will go about it with a combiniation of clip maps and geometry thats the best i got as of now unless i can find a cheaper way to do what hd instance seems to achieve .......from the look of it it replaces objects with its own low res replacment or clone using nulls a method simlar to pfx not sure if it use geometry or what but thats gives me another idea as well might i say



Can anyone tell me what exactly does fx link /browser do when u use pfx / nulls to clone objects ?? does it just mimic geormetry in layout or are they some form of a stand in?


the only thing im worried about is the shrub line around banks the will have to do some close ups etc as im hoping to have some animation inside of them( lil wind blowing that is)I know I'll sound like an advertisement, but this plugin is still one of the only that didn't totally dissapoint me.

I need to give it a big shout out.

What it does is takes an object and then allows you to use nulls, point, or polygons to place volumetric "instances" of the object all over the scene. Millions if you'd like. The benefit to this is not really rendering inprovements, but scene manageability. Using all of the geometry needed for your foliage(or my jungle) would make the scene so bogged down that it would be very diffcult to work inside of it.

The instances(with animation and all) that are drawn, are like real geometry that receive lighting and cast shadows. If you make a forest, when you fly the camera through it, there will be no discernable difference between the "instanced" forest and a pure polygon forest.

There are some limitations, one being that it doesn't support shadow maps. It's a great plugin though, and has enabled me to do things I never could have done in the past.

I'm doing an animation for Pfizer about Staph infection. When inside the lung alveoli, I needed thousands of staph bacteria infesting the tissue. I made an animation of clusters of the bacteria(over 50 objects parented to a a null) oozing about, then instanced it all over the surface of the alveoli. When flying the camera over the scene, it looks amazing...there's hundreds(maybe thousands) of staph bacteria swarming over the surface...

Buy it you have the bucks. I think it costs about 150.


www.happy-digital.com (http://www.happy-digital.com/)


Mike

[Tomaszski]

i just did an assignment which had to have heaps of foilage - trees, grass, leaves, mushrooms, etc..etc... I set my stage in rings of detail, for example where the camera would be focused on the most would have the most polygons etc... second stage was less detailed and so forth, though i pulled it off quite well cause i used DOF which blurred the far most low quality trees etc.. and made it look like they blended in with the rest of the foilage, but overall planning was really important - also, too speed things up in layout you might want to change all display subpatch levels to somethign like 1 or 2, they might look nastly but it will speed things up heaps when you move around.


Tom

[faulknermano]

learned a technique from a dave gerrard tutorial regarding creating a clump of leaves / shrub:

using a relatively low poly mesh (if you wish you could turn it to subpatch), displace it using a texture (e.g. Displacement Map) and then adding a clip map to it with a veins procedural texture. adjust the polygon size in the Objects Properties to increase or decrease shrub density. if you use a subpatch cage, set the subpatch order to first.

[Ziah]

hmm sounds good thanx guys ......i may have to still create certain circles of detail as it seems

[SplineGod]

There are two ways to also do LOD (Level of Detail) changes. One basically swaps objects based on distance to the camera and the other changes the subpatch level based on distance to the camera.

If you know exactly how/where the camera will move in the scene then you can optimize the foliage based on where the camera will go or look. :)

[vbk!!!]

oh !

i didn't know you can change the subpatch value based on distance to the camera.
what the way to do this please.

[Ziah]

hey larry how are things going

i tired emailing you the other day about that stuff but i din't get a reply if u happen to be online anytime in the near future aiim me i guess


Hmm what i have decided to do is to sepreate it into three sets

since i got more info on where the camera is going to be

During the process thanx to the input of u guys i have saw and came up with some pretty interesting methiods that i would be able to use laterr

After im done with this maybe i can post them is pic tut format or something if anyone would be interested i guess

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