Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: Suresh on June 19, 2010, 09:15:38 PM

Title: Billboard vs High Poly vs Low Poly strategy
Post by: Suresh on June 19, 2010, 09:15:38 PM
This is a pickup of my previous thread, but thought it would be good to call out seperately.

I have a large (very very large) landscape.
I have three sources of trees:
1) Forest Pack Library (billboards)
2) Various high poly trees (Itoo and elsewhere)
3) Vue --> which outputs trees as a few hundred curved elements each of which has a mapped texture, opacity and bump map. A complicated tree may be as few as 10,000 polygons as a result - but its a hybrid between billboards and hi-res poly meshes (100,000 poly's) and uses opacity maps for its tricks.

So, the question is what to use in my landscape project. I guess there is a trade off between realism, rendering speed and max resources.

My instinct says use billboards for the distance -- and then I don;t know what the view is on #2 vs. #3 above.

Thoughts from the pros? (OH VRAY is the renderer)
Title: Re: Billboard vs High Poly vs Low Poly strategy
Post by: iToo on June 20, 2010, 04:32:30 PM

For VRay the best choice would be to use mesh trees (low-res polys if available) without opacity maps. These are rendered really fast, and you get perfect shadows and top views are not a problem as the billboards. However each scene is different, so i suggest that you try all possibilities before choosing one.

You also can find some rendering tips here: http://www.itoosoft.com/english/menu.php?id=forest_rendering