Maxwell trees with Sketchup

frv · 15 Feb 2010, 15:26

Hi, since I bought Vray I am actually doing more work with Maxwell.

I am actually getting more enthousiastic lately on Maxwell and Studio and mixing techniques to get my SU models beyond what I thought was possible.

http://homepage.mac.com/fillieverhoeven/leaves/index.html
I have just textured these trees bought at Evermotion. I use them with my Sketchup models. The are adding incredible realism to my SU models. I added the car through Modo and into Studio/Maxwell. I did this to later place my SU model of the building.

I will show the results combined later.
Francois

thomthom · 15 Feb 2010, 15:57

What't the face-count of them trees?

frv · 15 Feb 2010, 16:47

If you like them for import in SU you have to deal with over 200.000 triangles for the higher green ones (95Mb mxs file per tree). I don't think Evermotion trees are effectively made with either components or instances for the leaves.

That's why we don't bother to import and assemble our work in Studio. There we use these trees with subsurfacescattering textures to make them look real. Studio does instancing so you don't explode your model copying these beasts around. Our SU buildings are about 10% of the rest of the file with cars and trees. Actually, very detailled cars are usually no more than 5Mb.

I don't hink you can ever do this with VfSU. But I am still experimenting with VfSU. I might be tempted to sell my license though since I somehow feel I am already to much into Maxwell to get properly going with Vray. Vray does seem to be a good renderer though for SU, especially rendering directly out SU.
Francois

thomthom · 15 Feb 2010, 17:06

So the trees are proxy objects in SU?

(I'm still longing for proxy objects in VfSU )

frv · 15 Feb 2010, 17:48

No, I place the trees in Studio, the standalone app by NL for Maxwell.
I can however import one tree in SU and then proxy these for export to Maxwell but its much easier to just import the trees seperatly along with the model of the building in Studio. Studio is very fast with even high polycount geometry. So if your just placing a dozen trees or so its easy enough.

thomthom · 15 Feb 2010, 17:53

I see. And if you need to update the SU scenes, you don't have to place the trees out there again?

frv · 15 Feb 2010, 21:35

No, you can just update by reimporting parts of the SU model. Even texturemapping and assignments are kept while importing. Its actually very simple and fast. I just came to work like this since the current SU plugin for Maxwell was not functional anymore with the new v2 of Maxwell. So I had to work with Studio which so far I had avoided as much as possible. But forced to work from Studio I slowly came to the conclusion that Studiois a very powerful app to use in combination with Sketchup. Sketchup is bad with big models which is something Studio is very good at.
Francois