Forests in maya mental ray.

#501

Visua just paste screen shot of the material parameters of grass :slight_smile: i can configure…

#502

Hi all.

Here is the link for some more test images that i’ve made with the grass.

http://yfrog.com/4jgrass2jx

#503

Nice grass man I can even smell it! Very nice color shade for dead grass too.

#504

can someone point me to a link which describes how to create the proxies (as discussed in this thread) in maya? It was briefly talked about at the beginning of the thread, but in no real detail and I cant find anything about it in the maya docs (other than the release notes which says little).

#505

I’m at my wit’s end. Anytime I try to use a cutout opacity map and hit render my machine crashes. I’m only trying to render ONE pfx tree and its still blows up Maya. I’ve got my accleration set to BSP2 and my primary rendering set to Raytrace instead of scanline. I even tried using proxi’s for the leaves, twigs, and stems.

If I remove the opacity map it will render but of course the leaves become rectangles.

What am I doing wrong/not doing?

Should I upload my simple scene?

Thank in advance!

#506

I hope this help you…
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/misc/c/wcreatemrproxy

to multiple conversions too…

#507

I’m at my wit’s end. Anytime I try to use a cutout opacity map and hit render my machine crashes. I’m only trying to render ONE pfx tree and its still blows up Maya. I’ve got my accleration set to BSP2 and my primary rendering set to Raytrace instead of scanline. I even tried using proxi’s for the leaves, twigs, and stems.

I had same problem, but in early maya vertion, it was cured by replacing maya MR shaders with shaders from XSI. But it was fixet long time ago (in 2009 i guess). What maya vertion? And upoad scene.

can someone point me to a link which describes how to create the proxies (as discussed in this thread) in maya? It was briefly talked about at the beginning of the thread, but in no real detail and I cant find anything about it in the maya docs (other than the release notes which says little).

Am i right, that proxys has no sence, cos same result you can get with maya instances?

#508

try instances and bsp2 and a 64 bit OS with 4-6 gigs of ram… should work out nicely.

#509

Seek and you shall find:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6353180&postcount=404

@syna: That is lookin really good, but the grass feels more like moss maybe some more
specular would do the trick?

#510

Well I was looking at my garden grass some times ago and I saw something very relevant: at least one third of the “grass” was moss! When the grass is cutted fresh it’s very noticable, toghether with some other little plants and flowers. Off course I didn’t make some treatment for some time :slight_smile:
And for wild grass it’s even more in proportion. Here you can see a little bit, and it’s not so much as other grasses:

So a trick could be using a mossy terrain texture for the ground… and/or using some moss model in the patch.

#511

Here’s my scene and two textures. There must be something wrong that’s preventing the cutout opacity to work correctly and causing a crash.

Any takers?

My thanks in advance!

#512

It’s the mia_x_passes that cause the crashes (on Maya 2009 win32). Delete them and use normal mia_x: it render fine. Upgrade it to x_passes: it crasher once again. Also, before I’ve cleanded up a bit the file; but I think the problem here is just hte x_passes shader.
On Maya 2011 there’s no crashes.
Apart from that, on this thread has been said not to use cutout opacity but just to model the leaf and then instance it (on BSP2 64 bit). That’s because instancies handle memory just better.

#513

Thank you!!!

#514

I just stumbled across this devastating script on CreativeCrash… Haven’t had time to test it yet, but it looks very helpful.

Dupliverts

It will duplicate (or hopefully instance) objects and place them on the parent objects vertices. I’m going to test it this week in Maya 2009… I can see this being excellent for forests or grass placement!

#515

InfernalDarkness: i haven’t tested but from what you say isn’t similar to Layout tools? At least you can instance objects to verts, edges or faces in a selected object.

#516

Syna: I am not familiar with layout tools. If it’s better, by all means stick with it! Any links or info you can share would be helpful, too.

#517

Here is some info about the Layout Tools … its pretty neat

http://area.autodesk.com/bonus_tools

I dont think its ready yet for 2011 … it should be soon

#518

Yes, i think that LT tools is much better! you can make a looot of diferent operations thar are perfect for what you want.
You can even make the distribution with primite objects (sometimes trees and grass patches have some complex geometry) and the replace with your trees and grass. You can make a random translate and scale and choose btw instance or duplicates.
It’s realy good and complete not only for trees but also for everyday.

#519

It seems Layout Tools isn’t available for 2011 yet.

#520

Just realized what I was doing wrong. When working on something too long, its a good idea to just leave it be and continue the next day. Something so simple and easy can very easily be overlooked.