Forests in maya mental ray.

#181

onyx is always giving me diamond shaped leaves, how did you obtain the square shaped leaf on the right?

i turned on “flat leaves” in Leaf Type and gave them a resolution of 1 but when i export the OBJ, i get diamond shaped leaves.

#182

When you’re exporting your leaves, click “Plates” and set the resolution just like you are, but you also have to turn “P Objects” to at least 1. I believe higher gives you multiple leaf-sets (useful if you want to make one tree with more than one different leaf-texture) and P Random randomizes them around the tree.

#183

It could be that you then need to uncheck “flat leaves” in the Leaf Type, but at the moment i’m unsure about that.

#184

You need to deactivate “flat leaves” or you will get all the leaves totally flat, and to have at least 1 p-object in the export options, you can set up to 10 p-objects to get 10 diferent objects that can handle diferent shaders.

#185

Here are two animations i’ve done:
The first one took 24 hours to render (quadcore, 3 GHz):

Link to trees.mov

In the second one I rendered the finalgather map first with the hints from Jeff Patton (faster foliage renders ) which was posted here in this thread.

Link to treesFG_optimize.mov

Finalgathermap was created for every second frame (maybe I should try every third or fourth frame?). With those hints the finalgather map only took 2hours and the images took 9. So instead of 24 hours it only took 11 to complete (which is still too much time).

Accuracy: 150
Density: 1
AA Sampling: 0/2

Third one on Vimeo .

#186

…other than the horrifying rendertimes!

I honestly can’t tell the difference between the “flickery” animation and the second one. They both look great to me, and I’m not sure I’m seeing any flickering.

But for an animation, you shouldn’t really need to rebuild your FG every frame. At 30FPS, your eyes won’t notice so much. Maybe try every 10th frame, and see if that looks horrible?

Glad to see someone else’s tree renders. This thread helped make a huge dent in a personal scene, and now I’m on to modeling a few other props before completing it. Spent a year struggling with Vue to make that scene, and only a few hours a week over the past few months making it work in Maya just fine.

#187

imo that density is at a pretty extreme level for this type of scene, that would be why the renders are really long. You could probably get away with a density of .1 and filter set to 1 or 2 like rygoody suggets.

Also try finding a randomizer script on Creative Crash because those trees are exactly the same height and facing the same way which doesn’t help sell the image because people can pick that they are the same trees even subconsciously.

But otherwise a nice little animation and the wind is really cool!

#188

@ InfernalDarkness: Both dont seem to be flickery. Its just a test how much faster it renders and how it differ when using the hint from Jeff Patton. And when comparing, I get much more dark result, but the rendertime is only the half.
And I will try to render the map for only every 10th frame. I am just a bit skeptical because the leaves are moving so much and therefore maybe produce some flicker.

@ Hamburger: What i’ve learned from this thread is that when one is rendering leaves and trees you need that high density for all the small details. tostao_wayne and other wrote that some pages ago. And youre right about the same look of each tree. Maya Layout tools were used to randomize the trees position, but not their scale. Problem with random rotation is, that the animation is baked into the geometry, so the trees cant be rotated very much.

#189

Hi Sven,
how are you doing?

Try scScatter: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/misc/c/scscatter

Maybe I can post some examples very soon. I want to build my tree scene with mip_binary_proxy nodes. I had all stuff too. I need to put it together.

#190

How can you have reflection using mib two sided? What do you conect to the front and back slot? is it the message or the diffuse?

Thanks

Edit: forget about it, already found the answer. I was usiong mia_material X instead of the normal one. Thanks

#191

Doesnt matter which mia_material you use. But you have to plug the “result” into the front and back.

#192

Great trees guys and thanks for all the helpful info!

@tostao_wayne - With your textures you show here, is the one named ‘transparency’ meant to be named Reflection? Because I can’t imagine how that one works as your transparency.
Do you use fresnel and if not would you mind sharing your BRDF settings? Also, is that tree pfx?
:bowdown:

edit: My other question to you guys is, did you manually select random leaf polys and shift the uv’s in order to use your nine variations? Or is there some way to automate a random poly selection in maya?

#193

Great trees guys, thanks for the helpful info.

@tostao_wayne - One of your textures you have named ‘transparency’, is that right? Or did you mean ‘Reflection’. I can’t see how that texture would work as your transparency map. Also, is that a pfx tree? And are you using fresnel or brfd settings? The tree looks brilliant! :bowdown:

#194

No, i didn’t use this map as reflections, the leaf has almost the same reflectivity in all it’s surface, but the leaf’s nerve must to be almost opaque, for that reason i use a transparency map, to fine tune that transparency.

Yes i use BRDF, about 5 in the refractive index. And there are tree models from some libraries, not pfx.

For the nine variation y use a script that lets me to divide the leafs in 9 groups, after that i can move the uvs.

#195

Please excuse my nooby questions but why isn’t the leaf completely transparent where it’s white in the transparency map? Is it something to do with the double side shader?

Would you mind telling me the name of the plugin for the texture variation? I’ve been searching but I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.

thanks again for the info, I really appreciate it.

#196

You can connect a texture to the refraction color slot and control its transparency with the transparency value (it must not to be greather than 0.3)

The scrip is at home made script, it work for me, but first i have to prepare the scene to work fine.

#197

Thanks again for the info tostao_wayne. You’re a great help.

Do any of you guys have any trouble moving uv’s around on such a heavy object like the leaves geo? When I try to move them in the uv editor maya 2009 just grinds to a halt and has to think about it for about 5 minutes or it completely freezes. My leaf object is about 40k. It’s basically stopped me from getting any further with my trees. (I’ve frozen geo and deleted history, Even tried it without a texture) :banghead:

#198

Do any of you guys have any trouble moving uv’s around on such a heavy object like the leaves geo? When I try to move them in the uv editor maya 2009 just grinds to a halt and has to think about it for about 5 minutes or it completely freezes. My leaf object is about 40k. It’s basically stopped me from getting any further with my trees. (I’ve frozen geo and deleted history, Even tried it without a texture) :banghead:

Hmm… What kind of leaf model are you using? With the leaves we previously played with, the UV’s were very, very simple. They didn’t need to be moved really; they were simply a bounding box for the shape of the cutout opacity file to reside within. This is the example I’m talking about, on the right:

Could you maybe post a screen of your UV’s?

#199

InfernalDarkness, keytay is talking about to move the uvs to get a 3x3 array of leafs for the texture, and for that you need to use and script, or at least you need to divide the geo into 9 diferent geos. to try to move the uvs manually is a hard task

#200

Currently I have the same problem as keytay :frowning: