The Plant Factory trees into Terragen

zaxxon · October 28, 2015, 11:59:05 AM

I recently acquired a full license of TPF and have had a chance to see how these objects work in TG. This image is a mix of ST(general foliage) and TPF (the Oaks). TPF and ST basically do similar things, but the differences are intriguing. TPF has a fairly steep learning curve I must say!

Dune · October 28, 2015, 12:45:03 PM

Great trees, Doug. And nice terrain and shrubbery as well. You can just edit your post and untick the wrong image, then save.

zaxxon · October 28, 2015, 12:49:14 PM

Thanks Ulco!

otakar · October 28, 2015, 01:18:52 PM

Not sure about the branching but the trunks and bark look great on the trees.

AP · October 28, 2015, 11:19:33 PM

The trees look a bit low-poly (sharp vertex edges?) but this image looks fairly photoreal (softness and lighting) and the vegetation distribution looks good.

Hannes · October 29, 2015, 06:51:02 AM

Great image. Maybe the bump of the oaks' bark is set a bit too high? It looks somehow unnatural to me.

zaxxon · October 29, 2015, 09:49:28 AM

These are my first tests at getting TPF objects into TG, and I'm still tweaking with the settings. The Oak tree is a retail item from the Cornucopia store. It was made by Frederic Bec, he is probably the best 3D foliage modeler using TPF from what I can see. The set-up in TPF is very complex and I've attached a partial screen shot of the interface. However, once the network is constructed it's a simple matter to adjust via sliders the age, health, and season of the tree in a parametric manner. Very slick.

Hannes: you're right. The bump map may be the culprit (from Crazy Bump) and I've continued to mess with the settings
Chris: there are 1.1 million tri's in the object, so any clunky-ness is in my scene settings. I have a couple of models to play with besides the Oak, but I probably haven't presented the tree as well as it deserved.
Otakar: Here's another image, hopefully the trees look a bit more natural in their shapes. Also another TPF object in there is the Dandelion plant.

Frederic Bec - English Oak: https://vimeo.com/141994574

Dune · October 29, 2015, 11:16:53 AM

Terrific! I very much like the vegetation coverage and layout. The tree is much better, there even seems to be less sharpness in the trunk profile. I always love the soft light you bring into your renders.
There's one thing bothering me; the vegetation on the barren slope seems not to rotate with the slope, and therefore kind of 'floats' a bit. What render settings did you use (detail/AA...)?

zaxxon · October 29, 2015, 12:10:11 PM

Hmmm. I'll take a look at the barren section. I revised the bump map in Crazy Bump to make it a bit 'softer', hopefully that will hold up in some other renders. The render settings were detail .8 and AA 12 using the Mitchell-Netravali pixel filter. About a three hour render on my 6 core machine.

otakar · October 29, 2015, 04:12:17 PM

Yes, very nice looking trees in the second image! Must be quite heavy, no?

AP · October 29, 2015, 06:23:36 PM

Yes, that is a decent amount of polygons. Now that i see the preview examples, the trees makes more sense to me.

TheBadger · October 29, 2015, 11:19:38 PM

Its very cool.

But doesn't that node network just make you dizzy?

zaxxon · October 29, 2015, 11:23:24 PM

Dizzy? More like shock and terror!

TheBadger · October 29, 2015, 11:26:27 PM

Oh good, I thought so too. Made me sick a little. But I did not want to be first to be up set by it

AP · October 30, 2015, 12:14:34 AM

Holy Nodes Batman!

I just now noticed all of that...