Yetanotherbirch
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I've been playing around with creating medium/low poly trees directly in Max, then importing. They map better (obviously) and it simply takes to long to physically moves branches and twigs around in SU. Here's one of the early attempts. The file size is a little high because it's all raw geometry...no repeated components. But as the old hands know, that makes no difference to navigability; as it's the number of faces that count, not the actual size of the file. This winter birch has only 1600+ faces...so it's not too heavy. It also renders nicely in V-Ray etc.
I hope you find it useful.
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Alan could you please show how the summer version looks like.
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I'm still working on the Summer maps, Sepo...but this full foliage autumn one should give you an idea what it'll look like. This is a V-Ray render straight out of SU. This is all geometry, so it's 12K faces...which is about the same as 4 or 5 low poly people. Heavy, but not impossibly so...although I wouldn't want too many of them.
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Good looking birch.
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Nice Alan!!
It really is such a shame texturing of trunks and branches cant be done in SU, I've found a really easy way to assemble and arrange branches in SU but the option to texture them correctly is just a no go!
Mate do you know of any simple apps to get the mapping correct?
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sweet, thank you!
so is the version with leaves typical of what's available on form fonts?
after a fairly recent need to get into rendering outdoor scenes, i'm finding one of the hardest things is getting good trees (and really, i have approx. zero desire to begin creating my own).. if form fonts could be considered a one stop shop for high quality trees then that fact alone may make it well worth it for me to join up. -
Richard, there are two applications I've used for years for UV work. Both are very cheap, both appear to be effectively one-man operations...and both are light-years ahead of Google in this area, which is pretty shameful.
Probably the best UV tool around is Ultimate Unwrap 3D . It's even better than Max...and all for $59.95. It's simplicity itself; the unwrapped mesh is in one window and the rotateable 3D model in the other. You see the changes happening in real time as you pull the vertices around over the image map. It appears to be having server problems today, as the site comes and goes.Another good one is Lightray 3D . This will not only do UV work pretty easily, but you can also use it to rig (and animate) figures. It's 69 Euros. I see it's got a new UV tool out last month, so I'll be trying the free upgrade.
They'll both communicate with SU via 3ds and a few other formats.Hi Jeff,
Yes, I’ll be uploading this one shortly. There’s already a ton of transparent png or tif vegetation such as this
You can use this stuff in renderers, but it requires a lot of messing around, generating separate alpha images to use for the transparency. So I decided to start producing a higher poly range of veggies which will just render straight off, because they are just geometry (with bark and procedural foliage mapping, where appropriate). Naturally enough, I’m calling them geometrees . There is quite a bit of the earlier stuff that doesn't rely on png, though...so that renders ok too.
Sorry about the advertising, guys...but Jeff did ask. -
alan,
please pardon my horrible pun but this is a son-of-a-birch of a tree!!! thanks.
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Hey Alan thanks so much mate for the informations there! I'll definately try them out!
I worked out a very simple way to run a texture up a trunk or branch using a few projections, which would have eased so much post work on a unfolded map - though each is exported to any render app as a separate material GRRR!
I so much wish for the day SU supports better mapping options!
Thanks again!
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