Custom Vue 5 Trees

[Wabe]

Nope, there is no way to create SolidGrowth plants (veg) from scratch.

The only way, and that is what people have done, is to modify existing ones in the plant editor and save those as new species then. This of course you can do too.

When you look at the polygon count for Vue native plants and compare it with imported, high detailed plants then, it is obvious that Vue has to deal with a lot more polygons when the plants are imported. And that of course results in longer render times.

Have you looked at Cornucopia for example to see wether there are plants that you maybe need? Or maybe at Dreampaints site where he offers some free plants for Vue 5? There are some interesting good ones around.

[youandwhosarmy]

Hi Mike,

Nice to see a fellow South African here.

The best thing to do in my opinion is to use custom built trees/plants made in Lightwave or XFrog (Daz3D is having a sale on this at the moment http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3704 ) with real textures for the bark and leaves for close-up/foreground and then to modify existing Vue plants to closely match these for the ecosystems.

The problem with using custom built plants in an ecosystem is variation, and in order to achieve some variation in the ecosystem, you would have to model 3 or 4 or more different versions of a plant to populate the ecosystem with, increasing the polygon count of actual geometry.

I have found that you can create reasonably close versions of Southern African trees using existing Vue ones, and as you can use custom bark and leaf maps, you can get pretty close to the more common trees. You may need to buy a couple of extra species, like the orange tree so you can show fruit if necessary.

What plants do you need to include?

Ryan.

[MikeBuckland]

We need to create vegetation specific to Southern Africa which includes Acacia, Baobab and riverine trees found in the major river valleys. I havent been able to test the many trees available with Vue as we only have the demo version at the moment.
Once we get the full version, I will definitely try to modify them as the first option, as they will probably render faster, and will be varied in shape rather than clones of a single tree.
Otherwise I am considering Pawel Olas's Tree Designer plugin, which generates trees for Lightwave and seem pretty flexible.
In that case I would probably follow your advice to modify the preset Vue trees for the background scenery to try and make them look like the main trees in the foreground.
Thanks for the input!
Mike

[MsLin]

Well, there already is an acacia and a baobab available in Vue now - you're part of the way there.

[MikeBuckland]

Doh!
Ok thanks for the heads up! I will play with them as soon as we get our copy
Cheers

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