Trees

[ea6b607]

I'm going to have to disagree on this with you buddy. It's quite simple to make good looking trees in not a whole lot of time (about an hour). Here is a great tutorial for it http://3dm3.com/tutorials/tree/ I will warn that they can get pretty high poly so keep that in mind.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by ea6b607

I'm going to have to disagree on this with you buddy. It's quite simple to make good looking trees in not a whole lot of time (about an hour). Here is a great tutorial for it http://3dm3.com/tutorials/tree/ I will warn that they can get pretty high poly so keep that in mind.

Yes, you can make a really nice looking tree, I never said that you couldn't. But you must take into account if it is worth it. Do you really want your computer to spend more than an hour rendering out the bunch of trees in the background even when they are going to be blurred? Just look at some paintings, the artist could have spent hours making detailed trees in a painting but they don't, why? because they are not the central focus of the animation. You do not want to distract the viewers away from what is really important.

Now if your tree is in the foreground, or it is the central focus of the animation then by all means go nuts! If you want a to make a tree character or a shot of a specific tree that you want to show the viewers then pour as much detail into it as necessary, but the trees in the background should be basic. Because they are only background elements, that only add to the atmosphere of the scene.

[ea6b607]

I agree completely that it is not necessary in all situations, but am merely stating that it does not actually take long to make them. Oh buddy by the way are you using camera angle dof in that or are you just using the lens effects dof. Looks pretty nice for the lens effect dof.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by ea6b607

I agree completely that it is not necessary in all situations, but am merely stating that it does not actually take long to make them. Oh buddy by the way are you using camera angle dof in that or are you just using the lens effects dof. Looks pretty nice for the lens effect dof.

Neither, I Render out a separate layer called Z-depth using render elements. Then i bring the two layers into a third party program and use the Z-depth as a mask to tell the Gaussian blur how much is each pixel is blurred. Its so much faster than using any of the blurs in 3ds max, Instead of rendering the scene 12 times to get the effect, The Z-depth layer doesn't not require GI, Final gather, or any lighting, materials, or anything else of that matter, only objects and the gray scale value is determined from the distance they are with the camera.

[ea6b607]

Makes sense, very useful information, but would that get messed up by transparent elements in front of the object. It is done essentially the same way the camera lens effect is done in max (which is also incredibly fast), but the camera lens effect gives a lot of problems with transparency and reflections and such.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by ea6b607

Makes sense, very useful information, but would that get messed up by transparent elements in front of the object. It is done essentially the same way the camera lens effect is done in max (which is also incredibly fast), but the camera lens effect gives a lot of problems with transparency and reflections and such.

then the transparent object and the reflections are rendered out in separate layers. With reflections you need the beauty pass without reflections, then just reflections, then you need a reflection mask. Then you can blur the reflection separately or even change the color if you want. All done in the third party.

[ea6b607]

Thanks, ya I'm good at modeling and texturing, but when it comes to everything else, I still need to do some research.

[Sergio]

http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/tree/tree1.asp

i found this useful. easy way to model trees and doesn't look half bad.

[adamrw91]

Well i found a cool max script called speed tree and with a few tweaks i came out with these and they look good!



grass looks like crap though. im going to fix that soon

[adamrw91]

hey when you render out a z-depth pass what program do u use with the blur?

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by adamrw91

hey when you render out a z-depth pass what program do u use with the blur?

adobe after effects

[pyr0b0y]

try speedtree, it works pretty well and is realistic