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So, where do the most realistic trees grow?


Pancho

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In a way it feels like RealFlow 10 years ago. Everybody tells you that this is the best software for water out there, but as soon as you tried to simulate water, nobody could tell you the "correct" settings for water. At best you could get an answer which sounded like "The setting's depend on what you want to achieve". Well, back then and now this answer has to components. On one hand it might be true to the extent that you are faking stuff and any way is good, as long as you get away with it visually. On the other hand it's been  bu..sh.., since the water in my glass doesn't change its specific weight nor viscosity, depending on how I want to drink it.

For trees and plants the feeling is a bit the same. There are packages out there like SpeedTree which are way overpriced and feel outdated. If you look at most examples they look kind of not soooo great, but then you look at archviz images which nail it. No idea where these trees come from.

I guess H would be one of the most versatile solutions to create trees and looking at l-systems makes you hungry, but so far I haven't found real proof of concepts with l-systems in a way that there are settings available which deliver what you could expect. The presets are, well, presets. Nothings fancyful. And taking of a year from real life and studying l-systems doesn't sound so fancyful either. In all posts so far people point you to websites with material on plant growth, some of them roughly connected to l-systems. But none giving you a real insight how to recreate trees or plants in H. Rohan's videos and the one from CmiVfx seem to be the best available.

There's also the way of using space colonisation.

And then you look at the 10 year old stuff from Arkadiusz Rekita and realize that this hasen't been topped so far (as far as I know).

What's the current state of the art way/program to create plants for usage in H? Curious... : )

Thanks for your input in advance!
Tom

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It really depends upon what you are trying to achieve.^_^

I feel the same way about plants and shrubs and such. But you know what when I was recently driving along the highway, before spring leafed out, I thought dang those look like really bad l-system trees over in that field. But they were actual real trees.

My most recent approach has been to rough it out with an l-system skeleton, use multiple crude l-systems stacked together to form a wider trunk. Follow up with a polywire then export that as .OBJ and bring it into a sculpting package like Sculptris, Blender or Z-Brush if you have it.

You may want to locate some hype-real textures, like mega scans or the like too.

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Searched the web for some hours now. Looks like GrowFx for MAx seems to be one of the best tools to do this kind of stuff, but I just cancelled my Autodesk maintenance (Maya) for good. So no chance to get on this kind stuff. Apart from that I would like to keep it in H. Any idea what GrowFx is based on? The idea behind it?

The downside of l-systems seems to be that they aren't aware of light and space. So the growth is purely mathematical, while in nature some leaves or twigs would never grow because of its surrounding companions and the shadow they cast.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Hi, Tom.
Quickly - well done not happen. For l-systems it is really need to spent good amount of time. Cmivfx explains almost every aspect of l-system. But how you use this knowledge depends only of you. With l-systems and vex can be produced almost every type of tree as you like. The most meaningfull thing - matematically correct grows. Then you can set probabilities of growth of every segment and cut shape with metaball. Reaction to light can be added to, but it is not an even solution.

Houdini let us use our imagination like no other soft. But you must know what you want and step by step go to the final result.

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