Forests in maya mental ray.

#881

Such an amazing fantastic thread guys, it really is ! :applause:
I’ve just spent about 2 or so hours reading through nearly 60 pages, haha :surprised

Is tostao_wayne still around these days ?
I really liked the look of his tree/branch script but that was a long time ago, just wondering if there is an up-to-date solution or mirror of the original ?

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6264081&postcount=233
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=6268211&postcount=241

Hopefully in the coming days/weeks I can contribute some examples but don’t want to get ahead of myself for the mo.

#882

@RagingBull
if you copy and paste the link to the script and test scene into your browser you will be able to download it
just clicking on it wont work

#883

Oooh yeah, how strange.
Thanks for the tip :slight_smile:

#884

if you happen to get it to work let us know, I dont think it does (even though people replied saying it did very early on)

#885

well it works but takes close to 1 hour to generate the tree (but it looks very good)

#886

I don’t get what’s the point of a tree gen script if there aren’t any leaves?
I mean they look indeed great but…hum? :surprised

#887

well it works but takes close to 1 hour to generate the tree (but it looks very good)

This would be dependent on your processor power, etc., but still - 1 hour for a nearly perfect tree base is about 99 hours faster than modeling it all from scratch!

I don’t get what’s the point of a tree gen script if there aren’t any leaves?

Tastao_wayne used another script to populate the leaves. He could tell you more, but I don’t believe he’s working on them much anymore. Or he finished his projects and is sick of doing trees, finally!

#888

Winter… :smiley:

#889

Haha I understand.
I came to the point that I’m happy with my trees. I use Onyx Broadleaf with multiple leaf objects, import them into Maya and use his uv-tile script for 3x3 leaves. I made a scene today with 6 different trees and bushes for z-depth tests (once again), since Bitter mentioned we should use the unsampled 32bit float images for plugins like Lenscare.
And we got a new renderfarm at work sooo… rock 'n roll I guess!

#890

Still struggling with z-depth on my end. Which method are you using that works best, m0z? Or should we post that in the other thread?

#891

I’m curious to hear how that plug-in goes.

And yes, you should have a 32-bit unfiltered z-depth to calculate correct depth. I am hoping these plug-ins use that data correctly. I generally use Nuke for those effects but a less expensive alternative would be nice!

#892

I did a number of tests with Lenscare about 5 months back when I was trying to figure out the best way to approach proper post Z depth. I found that lenscare worked much better with normalized data. It did not like the 32 bit floating point data.

What I ended up doing was going ahead and rendering 32 bit floating point data out of Maya and then normalizing that data in Nuke using a grade node before I passed it off to Lenscare. I did get much better results with no AA, though. I tested depth passes with and without AA just for the sake of thoroughness.

Maybe that will save someone else a bunch of trial and error, but I suppose its always a good thing to test it for yourself just to make sure.

-Justin

#893

I was playing with rvInstancer again today to try to get some really thick, packed foresty look… It failed. I cannot recommend this one for forests anymore, and apologize if it wasted anyone’s time. At a density of 500, with a simple 500K poly tree, it took ten hours to finally spit back an error. Tried it several times and it’s just not cutting the mustard.

Anyone else having luck placing trees and plants with particle instancing? How do I feed the normal vector from the surface into a particle setup?

#894

I am currently beta testing Vue’s Carbon Scatter. It really is looking like a viable solution to forestation. Definitely more effective then most other methods. Above it all, the computer handles it pretty well. The application is still buggy but hey…beta testing phase right? =)

#895

Above it all, the computer handles it pretty well.

That’s the winner there - the scatter plugin that lets us still use Maya in the meanwhile! I’m doing an above-the trees render currently, and even at 2K trees, Maya’s on its knees. Almost unusable, even with bounding box for everything. Interactivity is very slow, sometimes even selecting a single instance takes minutes just for Maya to update, even after saving, closing, then reopening Maya and the scene. It’s breaking me down! Nothing complex, just two mid-poly trees instanced about a thousand times each:

Has anyone else found ways to overcome Maya’s dependency graph slowness with forests?

#896

yeah, use mip_binaryproxy like I do :smiley: thousands of trees, no problem. Sure it’s a bit of work to prepare the proxy but it’s worth it imho. Time and nerve saving solution (and hdd space!)

#897


here we go…

onyx instanced with mia_x shaders, sun&sky and proxy grass. +some nuke color correction and volumetric light rays.

and lens_bokeh which I just used to test the new farm lol.

The grey grass patches are parented to a main grass patch, which I then instanced with spPaint3D script. I don’t know why they are grey, the shader is assigned etc. :shrug:

#898

Wow! :thumbsup: I would love to see that in high res. Could you list some facts like rendertime, polycount, how many cpus were used?

#899

That is really pretty man. Awesome job. What kind of render times are we looking at here if you do remember? I need a reference…ive been testing carbon scattter and it takes forever even with 12gb of ram and all that. Haven’t even tried baking in the global illumination and all that good stuff.

#900

sure…
I used just one blade of the renderfarm which has 2x six-core intels with I think 3,6ghz or so and 24gb ram.

Rendertime with mia_lens_bokeh (bokeh map + 16samples): ~9 hours
without bokeh: 10minutes. go figure!

with all 13 blades the bokeh would work in production.

settings: 2xAA, 0.08contrast, gauss with 2.5filter size.
fg: quality 50, point density 0.05, interpolation 50, secondary bounces
fg bounces: 2/2/4

raytracing: 4/4/8/5

one little bush has 40.000 faces, I think there are about 100 of them
six different trees with each about 1.5-2million faces - I think there are around 40 (cannot say for sure until tomorrow at work)
and finally the grass with 12-15k per patch and there are 1300 proxy objects for that.

so around 100million faces more or less (I’d say more…)