Custom Object / Speedtree / Alembic Group (Animated object)

[Beavertron]

Hi,

I've created a tree with wind animation in speedtree and exported to Alembic format, 10 seconds worth. This imports to 3ds max 2014 without problem via the Exorcotex Alembic importer. When adding the tree as a custom object it works fine, the animation is carried into itoo forest, great! However a problem encountered is that when imported the tree is made up of seperate objects all animating in sync so when ungrouped I can only selected, branches or leaves seperately. If I group the tree then add as a custom object itoo forest shows nothing. If I ungroup and pick the leaves for example it works fine. I had this working yesterday which is the frustrating thing. The tree is over 1mil in polygons and the Alembic (abc) file is 4.5 GIG. Not sure if this is causing the problem, file limit in iforest? I've upped all the display limits and toggles different settings to get them to show, no luck. Not sure if this is supported as this is Alembic but an interesting problem to address hopefully as the results would be sublime if this worked.

Hope someone can advise.

Thanks

[Beavertron]

Found a solution to this, or rather more official workflow.

Switched over to FXB export from Speedtree to using the included Vray Importer MS file. This brings in the object as a single mesh and with animation plus fully textured. Can then simply click and select the tree as a custom single mesh.

[iToo]

Forest supports any format that can generate an animated mesh in Max, including Alembic or others. But for trees the custom object must be an unique mesh, not separated parts.

Groups are supported, but for a different feature: to create clusters of objects that must be scattered together (e.g. clumps of grass and flowers). In this case, each item is handled as an independent item. You can see an example of use in the Forest 4 demo reel.