trees, trees, trees.....
hiker_1
Posts: 0
i've been trying out the abaro program and it makes some really nice trees-- unfortunately they're really nice BIG trees with about a gazillion polys that take the better part of a week to render.
short of a new computer, are there any tricks to reducing the polys or somehow compressing the obj for some semi-decent render times in Bryce??
TIA.
:8
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I haven't used Bryce in years but I believe there is an instancing feature?
Afraid not. Poly reduction isn't in Bryce's arsenal.
Bryce's native tree lab is generally cheap on polys.
just thought i'd ask.. it makes trees so much better than the tree lab does!
8}
Hexagon has a decimate functioin that works quite well which I have had to use before so I could load a prop into Bryce. That should help reduce the poly count whist keeping its shape.
You can play around with Bryce trees
Good looking Trees
On-line: http://www.horo.ch/raytracing/tuts/online/tut20/minitut20_en.html
PDF: http://www.horo.ch/raytracing/tuts/pdf/minitut20_en.pdf
I also like combining several trees to make one tree, as Bryce trees do render much easier than imported trees.
Just wondering if it might be the leaf texture that's causing the excessive render times- do the leafs use any transparency? If it does try going into the Render Options and turn down the Maximum Ray Depth until you start getting artifacts. Getting it down from the default of 6 to 5 or 4 can make a big difference in render times.
If it's all geometry, one other thing you might try is to load it into a modeler and remove all the polygons on what will be the "back" of the tree since that won't be seen in the render anyway. This is a very old Bryce 4 image using this technique (TreePro trees btw) - if you look closely you can see the backs are gone but I was able to cut poly use by around 40%.
You should post more of your artwork, Dan. An excellent Bryce 4 render!
Love the Dragon fly, which one is that ?
I agree. He reached a critical threshold with this one. ;- )
some really great ideas here... decimating in Hex and stripping out polys from the back are two things i *should* have thought of and didn't-- things i've done before in other situations.... i guess I just needed a group brain push....
@horo - if you're still reading this, i noticed in your tute that you had an arboro tree in a scene-- do you do anything special with them or just put up with the render times?
and yes, i did add some transparency to the leaves which would be contributing factor to the long render times.... (i didn not adjust the ray depth)
@cohole - that's a great idea about combining trees... that's one of the problems i have the the tree lab, is that the trunks are genrally too narro for a mature tree, and if you keep running up the trunk size, you end up with logs for stems in the upper tree-- looks like a ball of timbers.
thanks all for you input!
:8
Oh, I just experimented with different tree programs (Arbaro, Dryad, Ivy Generator, Plant Studio, Carrara, ...). Bryce trees are not bad, but could be improved (there was some improvement from 6.3 to 7.1: the typical Bryce bulge in the trunk is less obvious). The good thing about Bryce trees is that they are low poly count. I think the real vegatation guru visiting these forums is Rashad.
i would agree that Rashid is quite the greensman-- but it seems that he's not come across this topic yet...
Thanks so much for the comments on the image, it's appreciated!
Chohole - I modeled the Dragonfly in FormZ. I never did post it because (at the time) it was much to big in size. I'll try to dig it out (if I can find an Iomega USB disk drive, mine are all SCSI).
Ye dogz, an Iomega disc drive. If that is the same as one I had back in the day, I left it behind when moving along with all the other stuff a charity was going to clear and sift through, as we were vastly downsizing when we moved.
Hello hiker_1
Really nice trees regardless of which program they are made in [Bryce can make some nice trees too but it is a bit of work to accomplish this] are always going to be BIG. The ONLY Home PC program i know off which can import and render a large conifer with 100 million polygons [all those needles] and render it to perfection with volumetric shadows [so-called "God Rays"] in less than an hour, is 64-bit Cinema4D with at least 8GB of RAM!!! [ http://www.maxon.net/de/downloads/demo-version.html ]
I would not recommend importing large trees into Bryce! Sorry! I have done it. I have loaded a nice large Tree from Carrara 6.1 just now. Well i managed to get it into Bryce, but it took a long time to import and it was a lot of messing around in Carrara to be able to make it and export it. See picture below. [85,826 K file size]. And that's NOT really a "LARGE" tree in my experience!
But i suppose this tree, made in Carrara 6.1, looks nice but i have not had time to put Bryce materials on it [ but you can make something just as nice in Bryce - look at the vegetation work Rashad Carter has done in Bryce ].
I really would suggest you learn how to make nice Trees in Bryce. Compressing the mesh of an OBJ file Tree is a very complicated business [you can't just decimate it]. You can do things in Lightwave3D or Cinema4D to that end. But either of those 2 programs is expensive to purchase.
Well i am sure you have lots of good advice.
Kind regards
Peter
Carrara has indeed an excellent tree lab. But good trees are a poly nightmare. The important thing with Bryce trees is to set the leaf size small and ramp up the number. If trees are for the background, consider rendering some, including the mask, and make billboards of them. It is one of the strategies to bring memory usage down.
I would tend to agree with what Horo has said. Good trees require detail and that equals lots of polygons.
For this reason I'd say the approach one should take with trees depends on how close up one plans to view them. From a distance most trees, even Arbaro trees are great. Closer up, it get harder.
On the subject of Arbaro, did you know that this product in the store is nothing but Arbaro trees repackaged.
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/trees-for-the-forest/
Hands down the Tree Generator in Carrara is the most flexible tool available. The only issue is that in C7 and lower there was a bug preventing trees exported in obj format from displaying leaf uv properly. The bug is fixed in C8.
Bryce trees are good but not ideal for extreme close-up viewing.
Horo's suggestion to use transmapping is a great idea. You can draw an image with a dozen small leaves on it and load it as a leaf source, getting a dozen leaves for the polygon expenditure of a single leaf. But transmapping is extremely slow to render, this gets especially true when there are compound transmaps. Basically, the more complex the svcene is with transmapped leaves the longer it takes. For this reason alone I tend to try to avoid transmapping. But sometimes blend transparency is the only way to go.
Dan, that render is fantastic!!!!!
I've been doing a bit of thinking lately on this and comparing what I see in rl with what I would have expected to achieve in artwork and have noticed something. One should really brake down distance of the viewed object in at least 6 levels; extreme distant, distant, mid, near, closeup, and extreme closeup. What is necessary for each of these levels varies vastly of course, but what is surprising to me on observation is how even 'near' doesn't need as much detail as we might expect as our eye does not pick up the detail of the bark or leaves for instance. The trick it appears is that in rl there is a small amount of blurring going on even in near compared to closeup (30 feet vs 10 for example... varies from person to person a bit.) At 30 feet for instance, one could get away with a decent texture and a small amount of bump. At 10, one really needs a displacement map to look good.
3D software puts everything in sharp detail unless one uses DOF in their camera and, this isn't exactly the same as DOF. Rather, this blurring runs in conjunction with DOF. Add to this motion blur which starts at small amounts even with small amounts of motion (like walking) and we see how this can add up. Our brains average this all out and we don't notice it unless we consciously pay attention to it.
It would be interesting if we here went out over the next few days and did a conscious measurement of blur we notice under various circumstances and compared notes. :)
Final note on this, I think instancing and LOD are two areas that have a lot of promise in this regard. Having said that, extreme closeups will probably always be their own beast unless animating into it.
I mostly agree with Gedd... It amuses me when people put extreme detail (and therefore increase render time) in far away objects then blur them out with DoF.
I also laugh at myself when I do exactly the same.
:)