looking to purchase forest pack but is it possible to test 3d tree quality?

[F10Nick]

Hi,

I hear great things about Forest Pack, but my main concern is about the quality of the 3d trees. I have to do an ainmation of a city landscape, about a few hundred metres square with maybe 100 trees or so, so we're not really talking of a forest, but I am looking at this as a way of getting render times down.

The camera will be passing quite close to trees so they need to look good.

I have downloaded the lite version but it only seems possible to use billboards. Is there a way of testing this, and will it be much quicker that rendering 100 VrayProxy trees with 1 million polys each anyway?

Many thanks
Nick

[iToo]

Hi,

You can use 3D trees with Forest Lite, it has the same rendering capabilities than Forest Pro. We have included a sample billboards library, but you can assign your own meshes or proxies assigning them as Custom Objects.

Please, see Urban Park tutorial. The scene includes some 3D tree samples and can be completed with Forest Lite:

http://www.itoosoft.com/english/menu.php?id=forest_tutorial_urbanpark

Forest works as an advanced scattering tool, but it has not effect in render times. We have rendered scenes with millions of trees (each one with 1 million polys), getting low rendering times, so 100 trees must not be a problem for VRay... how much time take your scene to render ?

BTW, Forest Pro library doesn't include 3D objects either, only billboards. You must use your own models.

[F10Nick]

Many thanks. I will go through that. Render times are sky high at an hour a frame at the mo, and am currently trying to work out what the culprit is.

Cheers
Nick

[iToo]

Are you using VRay proxies ? Are the vrmesh files stored in a network path ?

I was yesterday working in a test scene, but i was getting very high render times, and that was the problem.

Also minimize the use of opacity maps in your plants. Using mesh leaves, instead masked texture, is much faster although number of polygons be higher.

This test scene includes 300.000 trees of 1 million polys each. Render time was 3'16" using a Quad core 3.4 Ghz:

[Nildo Essa]

Hello Carlos...

Are using vray proxies in this image? how did u fix the long rendertimes issue? did u decide to copy the vray prxies locally?

what RAM u have on the quad?

Nildo

[iToo]

Hi,

This scene was rendered using a mesh. I just repeated the test using different types of objects:

mesh: 3'16"
local proxy: 9'47"
network proxy: 9'53"

So, the problem does not seem to be the network. I don't know why it renders faster using a mesh... in other scenes we got identical results. A question for the VRay team, i believe. 

Quad has 8 Gb. RAM. Dynamic memory limit in VRay was set to 3 Gb.

[BLADE]

To speak from my own experience: I never thought the vray proxies were made for rendering speed but for rendering quantity. I am using a 32 bit system and I am working with scenes, where it were impossible to load just all the meshes that are the bases for the proxies. With proxies I am now able to render thousends of them.

I have tried some evermotion trees and as always with evermotion geometrie, the materials are far from optimized. Optimizing materials and avoiding opacity leafs cut down my rendertimes by ten or by hundred.

My scene now holds a complete valley with forest covered mountains (all 3D trees) and renders at HDTV an GI in 5 - 15 minutes depending on viewpoint.

Greets
BLADE