CompuServe Messages

Nick, >> I am looking for any good looking (not corny) vegetation << I've found a combo of techniques works quite well. I do like Schreiber for middle ground trees with a lot a perspective shift – you need plenty of RAM to fill a scene with these. Background trees can be done with "card" or "X" trees – they are just 1 or more rectangles mapped with a photo texture map and corresponding opacity map and Imagetects makes a cd-rom which includes some reasonable ones called Imagecels. If you have very specific need scan your own trees from tree books and create an opacity map in Photoshop. For close-up trees I've had good luck with Yost Group's Silicon Garden (SG), especially for young deciduous trees. They allow accurate cast shadows and are fairly low-polygon. By tweaking the .ls (l-systems) source code I've been able to make older trees than the default slider allows – beware SG will crash 3ds when you go too far because the 64k poly per object limit is exceeded. For extreme close-ups (like passing through branches) I make my own based on SG and then heavily tweaked: I loft branches using the original branches as a template where needed (sometimes fractalizing them), and use YG's Scatter.pxp to distribute extreme close-up quality leaves to the appropriate areas. Works great. I'm using all these techniques for a Japanese broadcast commercial and the clients are really blown away by the quality of the vegetation – it does cost bigtime in RAM, though. We are using the 3ds SGI renderer on our SGI ChallengeXL (8 cpu, 1gb RAM) for much of the rendering because our PC's with only 196mb RAM are next to useless for some of the layers. Many of the scenes are broken down into layers to make them more manageable for rendering and they are later composited together – a good technique to maximize rendering time with limited RAM. Well, you asked a small question and I gave you a big answer (sorry <G>).