Trees and Foliage in Lightwave 8

[Ultimatum]

I´m pretty sure that both of those plugs do the thing.

[zuzzabuzz]

I think the branching algorithm for TreeDesigner might be more visually appealing though.
Of course, it costs money. :)

[lrf]

But will either plugin cast realistic shadows from the leaves, or is it a mapped image of leaves?

[Ultimatum]

TreeDesigner+LeavesGenerator create actual polygon leaves, so it´s casting nice shadows.

With Treecage you can use ClipMaps for the leaves so they should work as well.

- U

[3DDave]

Tree Designer creates polygons in modeler, hopefully that answers your question.

[what_happened]

Tree designer is the tool of choice for me. It has endless possiblities, including animation. The site has some awesome, indepth tutorials and when you make the purchase, you get a bunch of different leaf and bark textures complete with clip mask. I have attached a few leave images I made a while back using this tool.

[Steve Warner]

Creating a single tree isn't typically a problem for LightWave. Creating "scenes with dense tree and foliage(jungle)" can be. It's not impossible. It's just that LightWave isn't optimized for this type of work and therefore it can be a strain on your time and resources. If you've got an unlimited amount of time, then it won't be an issue. But if you're on a deadline, I'd strongly consider picking up Vue5 Infinite. It integrates perfectly with LightWave and is specifically designed to handle this type of scene.

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5infinite/?Page=0

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Community/Spotlights/eran%20dinur/bali8large2.jpg

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5infinite/images/panorama.jpg

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5infinite/images/fluvialforest.jpg

[DMack]

Your poly count will soon become prohibitive, creating a jungle......unless you purchase HD_Instance, which I would thoroughly recommend....use instances for background, tree designer for foreground and you'll probably have to build a few 'hero' trees that your character has to interact with. With CA, you'll want to maintain a good level of interactivity so use standins or separated scenes. Best of luck.


David

[lrf]

Thanks people! All of your replies have been extremely helpful!

[angus1965]

I'm trying to create animated scenes with dense tree and foliage(jungle) My question is, what is the best approach for this, I've heard of Tree Designer and Tree Cage, but do these plugins create meshes that allow for close character interaction? As well, will the end result create leafs which cast shadows or do they only allow for trans mapped detail?
Any suggestions would help
Thanks!

One word for the background trees:

Cards

-R-

[Dave Jerrard]

Your poly count will soon become prohibitive, creating a jungle

Not true. I've written a couple tutorials on making trees, one of which appears on the www.animationartist.com website (http://www.animationartist.com/2000/Tutorials/LWTrees/lwtrees.html). using a minor variation of the technique I used to do leaves, you can do a full jungle of forest with very little memory hit. These images from Roughnecks show a very dense jungle, and most of the foliage in the background is composed of one or two objects. Pretty much the same object that appears in the tutorial. These rendered on 512MB machinees with room to spare.

http://webpages.charter.net/djerrard/T117-326_070.jpg
Foliage in the background is two objects - one behind the caharacters, and a clone of it scaled up in the distance.

http://webpages.charter.net/djerrard/T117-328_001.jpg
Three copies of the object, one for each tree and another that covers the background. Got a wonderful comment from Ron on this one!
http://webpages.charter.net/djerrard/T117-347_001.jpg
It holds up pretty well close up too. Again, same objects in both foreground and background. Did I mention the leaves blow in the wimd too?

......unless you purchase HD_Instance, which I would thoroughly recommend
If it works with clip mapped objects, this could be a serious enhancment to this technique!

....use instances for background, tree designer for foreground and you'll probably have to build a few 'hero' trees that your character has to interact with.

The tutorial, and this leaf technique are good for that. Always room for enhancement though. I never consider any of my tutorials as a finished technique. More like enough info to make you dangerous sort of thing. ;)

He Who Really Needs To Do Something Else Today.

[vpii]

HD Instance does work with clip map objects. Here is example of trees with clip leaves.

[Ramon]

Hey Steve:
I really like those renders from Vue. On there website, they state -"billions of polys" well that sounds great but, rendering speed is the question. Though I really like the quality, can you export all the functions of it's camera (motion, settings etc.) to LW for the purpose of camera matching? Because, if I were to buy Vue, the way I imagine I would use it is to render the environment and the render the "hero" objects in LW and comp them it in post. To do that I would need to camera match.

vpii: That looks very nice. I'm curious about how long did the set up (placement of all those trees) take? What was the render time like? Also, are those shrubs next to the road clip mapped too?

[richcz3]

Dave thanks for that link. I am working with Vue5 Infinite which can work with dizzying amounts of polys. Even though Vue can handle billions of polys it offers many ways to reduce its trees poly counts to reduce render times. Since my scenes will be a combination of Vue and Lightwave that link will help with dense backgrounds in Lightwave.
:thumbsup:

[-=ChroMatiC=-]

I was about to mention Dave Jerrard's tutorial on Trees but he beat me to it :/

His technique worked for me :)

[vpii]

Ramon yes everthing is plants using hd instance. for placement I go to modeler and use spraypoints on the landscape in top view. Then use KO pointfit plugin to rest the points on the landscape. each type of plant has it's own layer then in layout just use hd instance. Use can setup fast complex landscapes in minutes.

[Ramon]

vpii, thanks for your responce. That is a very nice method you've got there. Thanks for sharing the info. HD instance is a bit pricey given it's very niche type of app. When using HD instance, you have to "abandon" LW native renderer correct? So, do you comp in post the two renders -LW's and HD's (for instance if you need to render anything that is dependant on LW's render such as sas, hdri etc.)?
Thanks

[vpii]

No, Hd instance is just a plugin for multi clones of an object, you use lightwave render and functions like normal. If you want to save some money spray your points down just like before on seperate layers then in layout assign hypervoxel sprites to each point layers. So you need some type of plant or tree image that has an alpha map for the sprite to render right.

[vpii]

Here is another tip if you do the points with hypervoxel sprites. In your spare time load a null, then load a alpha tree or plant in images. Add a hypervoxel sprite to your null turn on viper. Then add from viper a sprite preset. while viper is open replace image with you next plant and so on and so on while saving each to build your preset library of sprite plants.

[Ramon]

Hey thanks for the info. :)
Okay, I thought HD instance was not only for multiplying objects but also used to render multi-million polys much quicker than LW. :shrug:
By the way, I'll try the spites to lay down the forest. The only thing is, that "card" technique really is only believeable when you see it at angles that are close to horizontal. if the animated camera goes up and rotates down to keep the cards (trees) in view, then the realism is lost. That is, probably if you rotate more than 50 deg I would say. Even though the sprites are oriented to the camera, it would look obviously like the trees are rotating towards the camera. Obviously great for far away backgrounds to fill the scene.

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