Forests in maya mental ray.

#161

so you would export every single frame out of Onyx as a obj by hand?
If so, how would I work with theses files in Maya? Key the visibility?

Those are great questions. Even the manual doesn’t help, except to point out the “Send” function for TreeStorm. For Maya, evidently you’d have to do it by hand. At 5 FPS, this is no problem. Anything higher and it’s gonna suck, obviously.

I’ve had the same copy of Onyx forever though, since my Bryce days; perhaps newer versions have newer options.

To joie and Damabiah:
Is there any benefit to using mip_binary_proxy over regular Maya instancing? I haven’t been using proxy on my latest scene, and am still able to push several thousand instances of twenty or so different plants through with no hiccups, using less than 3GB of RAM. I notice no benefit at this point to using binar proxies.

#162

only one, with the proxy you dont have to load your geometry into the scene.
Note that t’s not true that the advantage of proxys is that Maya reads them directly from disk and doesnt waste RAM, because even with proxys the FG and ractrayce calculation requires that all geoemtery be loaded into RAM.

#163

@InfernalDarkness : I have no problem with either solutions, that’s why I told joie to use one or the other.

@royterr : Seems like your right since I’m out of memory if a put too much instances (only 3gb on this system…) but somehow it take even more when I don’t use proxy. I just love love mental ray misteries.

What I’m sure of is that a cube take less memory than a tree when I’m working in my scene.

#164

only one, with the proxy you dont have to load your geometry into the scene.

I think I was doing proxies wrong previously; thanks for clearing that up for me.

What I’m sure of is that a cube take less memory than a tree when I’m working in my scene.

Very true! On some scenes I think that would work wonderfully. Sometimes I need a bit more contact accuracy than a cube can give, though, and my pathetic old Geforce doesn’t have any problem pushing 100+ million polys through the viewport. Of course, selection and tumbling take forever. Display layers work wonders (bounding box) in this case, which of course takes me right back to your statement of just using cubes.

#165

I need to get back to the animation question. It would be a real pain to export obj-files for a few seconds. Unfortunately the Onyx support mailed me that the only way to animate the trees is to use TreeStorm and 3ds Max.

#166

This method might be very brutal, but I’m certain it would work.

Rig an Onyx tree. It’ll take awhile, but it would work. With decent weighting, you might not even need a really complex rig.

#167

Thats a solution which will work for sure. But I have solved the problem in another way. In Max I created a Point Cache and exported the tree as FBX. In Maya i simply import the FBX and imported the .mc file which Max created for me. Maybe not a big deal but I dont know Max very well, so im glad it worked :wink:

#168

Regarding the onyx librarys, do they come with sky sensitive leaves or is there an option to activate that on a model?
there are lots pf parameters, what are the most important ones that you guys use frequently to shape youe trees?

#169

Regarding the onyx librarys, do they come with sky sensitive leaves or is there an option to activate that on a model?
there are lots pf parameters, what are the most important ones that you guys use frequently to shape youe trees?

Onyx Broadleaf has an option for “Sky Sensitive” in the Leaf dialogue. So, on the far right-lower section, click the Leaf, and then click on “Phyllotaxy…” There is a checkbox there for sky sensitive. Also note that on “Leaf Type” there are various options as well, but much of that won’t make it through the .obj conversion. Note that Conifer, Bamboo, and Flower don’t have options for sky sensitivity. I don’t think they are necessary for these others.

As for parameters, I tend to start with height. For the sake of accuracy with my arch/viz scenes, it’s an important factor of course. This way the leaves don’t look off-scale, which has often been my problem in the past.

Other than that, just play with the angles and seeds. I try not to just use a default library pose, but sometimes it’s all you need.

#170

“sky sensitive” is an option into the leaves options under the Phylotaxis button. It doesn’t work as it must, it is imposible to do a leaves disposition diferent than in a Maple or Elm, all of them are arranged laterally to the branch. and if you don’t use “sky sensitive” options the leaves are disposed with no sense. Create an european Oak an olm oak, or a simple privet is simply impossible.

Also it’s too hard to do a tree with two or three principal branches, ussually you must to use a trunk with a more or less “regular” look.

For these, i’m developing my own script to reuse any principal tree structure, the trunk and one or two branch levels and create over it the rest of the branches and a leaf structure that has some sense.

#171

Onyx Broadleaf does indeed have many shortcomings. Still, I think it’s a pretty good start, and for distance trees it does pretty well. Conifer has a few more options (such as the phyllotaxy options you’re talking about, tastao_wayne) that I wish they’d put into Broadleaf too, but for the most part they’re pretty convincing. Much moreso than Maya’s PFX trees, or Vue’s trees for certain.

But keep us posted on your script, tastao_wayne, if you feel like sharing? I’d love to have some more options, and I’m pretty sure the others who visit here would too…

#172

I want to post some results too. Only one tree has 5 different leaf textures, all other got one for all leaves.

5 min render:

5 min render (the left tree has 5 different leaf textures):

10 min, from underneath:

12 min render:

Those were my settings:

Thin walled of course. And the translucency map = colormap*4

And I’ve rendered an animation which you can watch here:
–> Video: Link to Vimeo
Settings:
Sampling:0/1
FG: 100
PointDensity: 1
Interpolation: 20
Rendertime: 36 Hours :frowning:
And flicker like hell.

Well the leaves are a bit too dense in all pictures. Each tree has only 30.000 polys. This is because I export them from OnyxTree to 3ds Max with TreeStorm (to animate them). To export it to Maya, I need to create a Point Cache in Max. This Point Cache seems to dislike more than 30.000 polys :frowning: I already asked how to solve this problem in the Max forums, but no one answered.

Would be glad to get some feedback :slight_smile:

#173

Looking pretty good! I don’t see much flicker in your video, really. A decent test.

Well the leaves are a bit too dense in all pictures.

I rather disagree. The leaves look good, but I think in your ten-minute underneath render, they are far too transparent. You shouldn’t be able to see another leaf’s texture through a leaf. Shading, yes, in terms of darkness and lightness, but most leaves aren’t that transparent. I think your x4 translucency may be overkill? What do they look like using the same texture for your diffuse as you are for your translucency?

Otherwise, great work.

Those five-leaf textures look great, too.

#174

I will post it here when i will get an aceptable result.

I’m agree with infernalDarkness, the transparency value must not to be greather than .25, also you must to render the images with a textured grass floor or at least with a green floor

this is a render with a 50% grey floor, the leaves that must to be in shadow apears too bright and washed out

and this is the same render with a grass textured floor

this is the overexposed reference photograph

some images more with the same tree and diferent exposures, the leaves are all of them two sided shaders with translucence, bump and reflectivity. It’s not a perfect model (too much dense in some areas, and the leaves aren’t sky sensytive) but it works to test some shaders an to get the rough look of an european Oak

If you decrease the transparency of the leaf to .25, the only way to get a translucence leaf is to use a translucency map with it’s intensity multyplied by 4. by this way it will by almost opaque with front light and totaly translucence with back light.

#175

Yes, the transparency was to high there and so was the translucency map. I’ve corrected this in the following two pictures. Bots with .25 transparency multiplied by 4 to get the translucency map.

First one without gras texture for the ground:

Second with gras texture:

Great difference. Thx for the tip, I should have noticed that for myself :wink:

So heres the shading network:

Pretty small, nothing special here.

@tostao_wayne: how many different leaf textures are you using for this oaktree? And why are you using a doublesided shader and how is it build? (condition-node?)

You seem to be pretty close to your reference :thumbsup:

#176

Wow, neat renders guys. Trees are looking great.

#177

i use 9 different leaves into only one texture.

this is my shader network

I use a mib_twosided mr sample compositing node to conect one mia_material to the upper side of the leaf and another mia_material to the lower side of the leaf, this is because the leaves “always” have a diferent color, bump, reflection… on the upper side than in the lower side. ussually the lower side is more claire and less reflective.

these are the upper side textures

difuse:

translucency:

transparency:

bump:

and these are the lower side textures:

difusse:

Translucency:

Transparency:

Bump:

The difusse and translucency maps are diferent because the two diferent sided of the leaf must to have almost the same color with backlight.
The transparency map also is conected as color multiplyer to the translucency map to mark the nerves of the leaf.

#178

Thank you for this detailed post!
Shame on me, but I cant get the doublesided to work correctly :confused:
This is the network I have:

And when I render, I get those artifacts:

Well it just look like some problem with the alpha channel. But then again its not happening on every leaf.

I guess its something extreme simple :banghead:

#179

Sorry i forgot to mention that the mib_twosided didn’t work like shadow shader, you must to conect one of the mia_material to the shadow shader slot.

it looks better now :thumbsup:

#180

thx tostao_wayne, that solved the problem :slight_smile: