Just Nature !

kwistenbiebel · 2 Sept 2008, 00:04

Hi friends,

I am experimenting with ways to represent vegetation in animations using Render software.

The goal is to make it reasonably low poly, while still upholding a sense of realism.

Methods used:

The "double plane grass" method Richard mentiond some time earlier (Thans Richard for that):
The two horizontal surfaces have a 1 cm seperation between them. The upper plane has a B&W noise pattern as clip map assigned.
The trees are just trunks with 'face me' leaves. As far as I know Fryrender is the only current render app that actually works with face me components as it updates the geometry calculation for each animation frame. The tree component just weighs 550 Kb.

3.light: HDRI + Physical Sky/sun (weighted by 'layer blending')

This is my resulting animation so far:

http://www.vimeo.com/1648330
[flash=640,480:388uq448]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1648330&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1[/flash:388uq448]

(youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBHAS2haM4&fmt=18)
[flash=425,344:388uq448]http://www.youtube.com/v/1pBHAS2haM4&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18[/flash:388uq448]
.

solo · 2 Sept 2008, 00:13

Awesome stuff chris.

Pretty realistic looking, the sound really adds to the illusion.

boofredlay · 2 Sept 2008, 00:42

Yes. At first I thought it was my dog barking.
Great work.

pilou · 2 Sept 2008, 00:50

Maybe this can interest you Video is page bottom
As you wind is missing, maybe a same day so quiet

kwistenbiebel · 2 Sept 2008, 01:06

Thanks guys.

@Frenchy Pilou,
That link looks interesting. I don't understand Spanish but it seems those trees consist of clipmap leaf clusters that are generated by a piece of code.
Would that mean, a ruby could be made which does the same for SU?
Would be nice : the ruby could ask to browse for the leave cluster bitmap (.jpg) and trees get generated automatically.

Chris Fullmer · 2 Sept 2008, 01:10

Really quite impressive. That is a great outside setting. I need to work on that.

Chris

tomsdesk · 2 Sept 2008, 02:46

These are quite nice! More please...

pbacot · 2 Sept 2008, 03:57

That looks really great. A couple questions from the curious. When you say the leaves are face me, what is this element? All the leaves of the tree are one image/polyon, clumps of leaves?

EddyNL · 2 Sept 2008, 06:12

OMG, you and your movies!
Really nice result.

remus · 2 Sept 2008, 07:42

Good stuff, definetly edging ever close to realism.

If your lookign for sometihng to improve on, might i suggest adding a bit of detail to the base of the tree. Its got a bit of a 'column sticking out of the ground' thing going on at the moment.

Teezer · 2 Sept 2008, 13:27

Very nice! It's like an Aardman piece -- I kept expecting Wallace & Gromit to show up...

spadestick · 2 Sept 2008, 14:56

truly mind blowing! did you do this on a renderfarm or single pc?

marked001 · 2 Sept 2008, 16:37

the grass looks amazing! the low poly trees...like remus said.. could use a bit more detail.. but for low poly, they look awesome. thanks for another great animation.

evilelvis · 3 Sept 2008, 00:59

hehe great job..looks "fook'd up"

Richard · 3 Sept 2008, 01:29

Mate you have done it again! Super work and outcome!

Would love to see a higher res still image! Your grass is looking good, well from what we can tell from video! The tests I've done so far with this technique of two planes is coming out crap!

Would love to see an example of the trees too, and how the leaves are pinned. The foliage looks like it could be a bit denser and smaller leaves IMHO but if the scene had building as context the eye wouldn't be so drawn to this!

Great stuff mate! BTW how are you finding working with Fry???

Hey and your welcome on the idea of the two plane grass - hopefully your skills can push it to work a bit better than it is for me!

Cheers, Richard

brodie · 3 Sept 2008, 03:03

Totally agree w/ what everyone has said, this looks really good. The grass and background/midground looks amazing. The foreground low-poly trees look...well, low-poly, but what do you expect? Very nice

-Brodie

Jackson · 4 Sept 2008, 06:27

Easily the best rendered grass I've seen in an animation- on the low camera sweeps it really looks like there's blades of grass sticking up! I tried the 2 plane method before, but it came out nothing like this, it just looked like a fragmented flat textured plane. Also the clipmap made renders slooooooow. Great work

Jackson · 4 Sept 2008, 06:43

Forgot to ask- if Fry recalculates face-me geometry before every frame, doesn't that make for very slow renders as it has to parse the scene before rendering?

kwistenbiebel · 4 Sept 2008, 09:14

@jackson said:

Forgot to ask- if Fry recalculates face-me geometry before every frame, doesn't that make for very slow renders as it has to parse the scene before rendering?

When hitting the render button (a green arrow icon), there will be a warming up period (= export phase) and you'll see the SU viewport shift through all the scene tabs and in between frames. For a longer animation (300 fps) this takes about 5 minutes in total. For each frame a .bin file is written in the process.
Once that geometry phase is done, the render screen will pop open and starts rendering all the frames.
The fact that Fry will take geometry changes,layer visibility etc. into account makes a lot possible: object animation, face me components and all attributes per scene will be shown.

Currently there is a bug when trying to render animations on really big files as a temp folder will get 'full'. I hope that will be fixed soon.

About the double surface grass: the blades of grass aren't really there. It's a fortunate side effect of compression

yuyayu · 31 Oct 2008, 03:09

Wow wonderful trees and good tip. VFS now can not render animation camera facing object correctly.