[EADC]

Mike, what lies ahead, could it be something like the displaced skin of your newsletter creature? Taking another look after reading this thread gives me the impression it is not just (pre-displaced) geometry..

[deadalvs]

umm, guys..... let's push this a little more...

please feel free to post also rendered trees from other packages like vue or whatever application...

okay ?

[KurtS]

also, we could post a few pages where cool bark textures/leave textures can be found...

might be something here:
Bark: http://imageafter.com/search.php?offset ... earch=bark
Leaves: http://imageafter.com/search.php?search=leaves&x=0&y=0
Branches: http://imageafter.com/search.php?search ... es&x=0&y=0
roots: http://imageafter.com/search.php?search=roots&x=0&y=0

[michaelplogue]

I think I'll give this a whirl this weekend..... One thing I'd like to see is good SSS on the leaves - which I may try to fake to speed up rendering times.

[deadalvs]

i just created a nice «platanum» species tree, had no chance to render it though, will come soon. it's leaves use SSS and light actually shines through nicely...

* * *

@ KurtS : thanks for the links !!

[bakbek]

Trees are important... doing mostly Archviz, we have to have good trees. still working on a constant formula though... here are some examples.

[deadalvs]

cool images !

please share the .mxm files with us !

the .mxm board needs some attention regarding leafs and bark ...

[deadalvs]

just rendered these image:
two «platanum» trees in a courtyard



two errors:

• trees grow from stones
• the stem has too few polys, thus shows a straight sunlight tangent

another strange thing is that the parts of the bark texture that are in shadow appear very dark

[casey]

I thought I'd already posted this to this thread, but it doesn't seem to be here so I'll post again. Apologies if for some reason a moderator didn't like it and deleted it - please tell me if that's that case so I won't think the posting failed.

Anyway, I was going for painterly, not realistic, but I really like the look I got with Maxwell for the trees in Molly's upcoming game:

https://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=347

The game has not been announced so that's the only final render that's been posted.

The only thing that I really didn't like about using Maxwell for the trees was that the material system doesn't support thin-wall translucency, so the leaves do not properly propagate light. I tried for a while to get things set up such that they could use SSS to simulate the thin-wall translucency of the leaves but it never gave satisfactory results so I gave up. The leaves need to be extremely thin and the SSS doesn't seem to like that.

I really really hope they will add thin-wall translucency to Maxwell someday, but it doesn't seem like they're going to I posted about it before (http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=15530), but I think it fell off the radar.

It would rock though!

- Casey

[deadalvs]

hey this happened to mee too yesterday... but at a post that would not be deleted... might be something with the forum software !!

[acquiesse]

thought I'd already posted this to this thread, but it doesn't seem to be here so I'll post again.

Hi Casey, try checking the "Why does my render have less shadow/depth than a RHINO render" thread

[casey]

Argh! How did that happen? I guess it must have been user error There isn't some weird thing where having multiple forum threads open in tabs makes the post go somewhere else? I doubt it, I think it's URL based, so I guess I just messed up. Sorry

Anyway somebody asked in THAT thread about the screenshot and:

Is this a Maxwell screenshot? Are you using Maxwell as a games engine?

Yes, it's a Maxwell screenshot. The game has 2D rendered backdrops, so that's why I can use Maxwell. Obviously if it was real-time, there'd be no way to do so. I think you could probably do something of reasonable quality like this in real-time, but that's another story (the game is 2D for hardware compatibility reasons, not because the art wouldn't be possible with a beefy 3D card).

Using 3DSMax 7.1 on Win XP Pro x64, spec as below, I can't export more than 15 million triangles from Max via the plug in. Why are you having trouble with 3 million in a x64bit version of Max?

I'm using 32-bit. The situation could certainly be improved if I bought a new machine and a copy of XP64, but the reason I talk about the export limitations in the Molly Rocket thread is because Maxwell's exporter isn't written properly, so it requires lots of additional memory to export a scene. Hence, however much memory you have, you can only use a portion of that for the scene because the Maxwell exporter is going to allocate a massive amount of memory to do the export (when really it should hardly allocate any - streaming-style exporters handle scenes of arbitrary complexity with only the overhead of the largest mesh, whereas "buffer everything and dump" style like Maxwell require memory proportional to the total scene, and that's a big no-no). So it'd be nice if they just fixed that instead of counting on ever increasing memory sizes to save the day when memory isn't really the problem.

Of course for that matter, MAX is totally fired for not having the ability to swap nodes to and from disk so your scene size can be infinite, but since all their infrastructure revolves around gobs and gobs of direct access to physical pointers, they're probably not going to fix that anytime in our lifetimes.

- Casey

[deadalvs]

well, don't buy this ... ! this looks so bad !

http://www.doschdesign.com/produkte/3d/ ... ender.html

[jeso]

great source about trees
http://www.baumkunde.de/

[lllab]

"Anyway, we'll just have to see what lies ahead for Maxwell!"



good to know
cheers
stefan