I just read about this on the Rhino 3D news group and knew you guys would be interested in this. I have not tried it out yet but I will be soon.
http://dryad.stanford.edu/ (http://dryad.stanford.edu/)
Glen
Looks like a really interesting approach. The images on their site don't seem particularly realistic but they're all from the internal renderer. Hopefully someone will post here with their results in TG2 so we can see if the models themselves are capable of high quality.
- Oshyan
Interesting and free. Thanks for the link. Worth a try at least. I will try and post some examples later on and see how good these trees look.
It was also on Slashdot... I took a look at it earlier today and didn't think the quality was up to snuff for intense TG2 usage. I hope that I'm wrong, though....
So far so good. I would put these trees on par with a slightly less optioned Arbaro, but with a better interface. So far, the trees all imported directly with no problems. Just needed to tweak the shaders a bit now, as they are super dark.
Thanks for the link!
Thanks for the link, Glen. Personally, it's still going to be a couple of weeks before I even have time for test renders. Worth investigating, though.
Well, the trees are coming out nicely. However, I am having all hell trying to apply an image map shader to the trunk surface. Regardless of what I do, a smooth color comes out, like its zoomed in past the point of a pixel. I've even tried a power fractal at scales down to 0.0001 and though its black and white...it just shows white. Strange, and chalking it up to a possible bug for now. Otherwise, these are great for medium distance on out.
Arbaro generated trees had a similar issue - the range of texture coordinates ran from 0.0 to 1.0, regardless of how tall it was.
Try running it through PoseRay and adjusting the texture coordinate scaling in the vertical axis. Can't remember the exact sequence of commands...
Yes, the trees are dark here as well but no matter i am not to impressed with this software but it is free. Overall it is slow to start and slow to edit, even saving as a .obj takes a bit. My file was a whopping 90 megabytes but i had reduced the branch and leaf count as well as the smoothness settings and i managed to get the file size down to 45 megabytes.
It is a simple no-brainer tree maker so i suppose it will be useful to some. Arbaro has more options. Still, the details of my tree turned out nice for a 45 meg obj.
Don't mind the quicky test as it is the first time i ever imported anything into Terragen 2 so i had no idea what i was doing.
Well I'm glad there some hope for it, I have some things to do with the family and then later I will give it a try.
Glen
I can't get it to run at all, it keeps telling me that I am missing a Windows dll only not always the same one Video Card drivers?
Actually, I think this application has serious potential. It has the detail required for populations, and the file sizes are not bad. Yes, its slow, but I like the UI better than arbaro (which seems to tank on me half the time).
However, the generated trees require shader work in TG2 to get right, but since I modify all trees I bring into TG2, its no problem.
yea...can we not take the obje to poseray before we bring it into TG2 and add textures there??....and also, does Dryad write UV info while exporting to obj???
Yeah, the program isn't terrible. Here's a small test render I came up with too.
It's unnervingly slow, but if you play around enough you can come up with something cool looking.
Hi all. I must admit that its painfully slow, but it seems to work well, as long as you run it through poseray after export. Below is my effort, only rendered in quick render at 0.25 quality, but I think the software definately has legs.
nice mr-miley.....I have tried running it through poseray....but I dont know poseray very well...so I was unsuccessful in giving it textures...
I've been using it the past few days, and starting to like it more and more, and better than arbaro.
First off, its FREE, and the results are actually quite detailled for a free object maker.
I am mostly using it for medium to distant foliage. It would work for up-close foliage too, but would require serious shader work.
Yes, it is slow, but thats fine with me, if its free and not unusably slow.
It DOES require import into Poseray vs direct import into TG2. If you don't, the shaders are super dark, regardless of what you do. Poseray normalizes something in the obj file materials that make it work better with the current version of TG2.
It DOES require shader tweaking in TG2 once imported. In fact, I always go back and retweak shaders in all objects I've imported into TG2, even pre-made or pro-made ones. They always look better if this is done.
hey moodflow...can you please teach me how to apply textures to objects exported from dryad in poseray??....
Quote from: dhavalmistry on January 17, 2008, 06:38:02 PM
hey moodflow...can you please teach me how to apply textures to objects exported from dryad in poseray??....
Hi Dhaval,
I don't use poseray to apply textures. I just use it to normalize the .obj for TG2 use. I apply the textures in TG2.
ok so how do you normalize in pose ray and what does it do??...
Interesting, I'll have to give it a try.
PoseRay has a good standard output for objects. You shouldn't need to do anything to just normalize, though I go to the Groups tab and select Calculate Normals and hit the Update button. I also check the Materials tab to make sure the textures are all in place per group.
Just export and save as an object file, when you're ready.
Quote from: dhavalmistry on January 17, 2008, 09:00:11 PM
ok so how do you normalize in pose ray and what does it do??...
A little add on:there are applications that don't generate
normals on obj export,which can cause problems in other
apps(TG2TP for instance) and you can fix that with
poseray.Most likely you can fix broken normals also,but i
don't know for sure,didn't test that.
just realized something.....the blue circle with "X" in the middle....represents the breed of species.....so if you have the blue circle in the middle of two species...the resulting tree would be the mix of the two species....
I have a render running at the moment which is going to take a while, but I'll be taking a look at this later. The lack of variation in leaf placement seems to be the biggest concern I have from the samples I've seen.. and the performance notes on the site seem to be a bit scary.
If you're using an old version of Arbaro you might also want to get the newest version. The addition of images illustrating which part of the tree each of the settings affect was a big help in using it.