Digital Art Zone

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

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 ?

Horo - 11 July 2012 01:40 PM

You should post more of your artwork, Dan. An excellent Bryce 4 render!

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).

dan whiteside - 13 July 2012 06:14 AM

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.

hiker_1 - 10 July 2012 03:54 PM

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

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