Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: hubmer3 on February 24, 2016, 11:20:05 AM

Title: Large Scene Creation with Automatic Variation Rendering
Post by: hubmer3 on February 24, 2016, 11:20:05 AM
Hy,

phhhuu..... a few questions about a job with the following criteria.

25 images in total
1 scene (house, grass, trees, mountains)
5 variations (spring, summer, autumm, winter without snow, winter with snow)
5 different lightning conditions (day with sun, day with slightly cloudy wheater, day with complete overcast sky, evening, night)

But first of all i have to create a Terrain wich i can further scatter with forest  8)

1. What software was used to create such a nice terrain shown in your surface tutorial?
2. Is there any recommended plugin/workflow wich works best with forest?
3. i haven't get in touch with state settings in max. is this the best way to do the switch between the variantions? are the state sets able to capture forest parameters?
4. the elements (trees, houses, background, foreground) should be on seperate layers for further editing. whats the best way (Object id's? Masks?)
5. how can i complete automate the rendering process? so that i can render all 25 images in one fly? My solution about rendering in one go would be with the timeline...

thanks a LOT in advance

greets phil
Title: Re: Large Scene Creation with Automatic Variation Rendering
Post by: Paul Roberts on February 24, 2016, 02:31:08 PM
Hi Phil!

Thanks for contacting us, It sounds line an interesting project. It's hard to give you exact directions for this because each artist has their own way of doing things but please find some answers to your questions below.


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1. What software was used to create such a nice terrain shown in your surface tutorial?

The terrain data in that tutorial comes from DEM files freely downloadable from http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/ . These were then stitched together and then used with a displace modifier to create the landscape with corresponding satellite images (also available from USGS) to create the textures.

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2. Is there any recommended plugin/workflow wich works best with forest?
Anything that produces a polygonal surface should be fine. We haven't extensively tested all the different terrain modelling applications but internally we tend to use World Machine. You might be interested in this recent post that discusses how to use Forest Pack on displacement surfaces. http://forum.itoosoft.com/index.php?topic=3495.0

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3. I haven't get in touch with state settings in max. is this the best way to do the switch between the variantions? are the state sets able to capture forest parameters?
State sets seem like a good idea for this scene though you can't use it to capture modifier or object parameters (you can see a list of what State Sets are able to capture here (https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-41DDC0A0-28CE-40EA-9162-9EE520955A50-htm.html)). In this case I'd create a layer for each season, each with it's own Forest Pack objects. You can then use State Sets to turn on or off the visibilty of these layers. I know a lot of people also highly recommend RPmanager, but we haven't tested it extensively with Forest Pack.

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4. the elements (trees, houses, background, foreground) should be on seperate layers for further editing. whats the best way (Object id's? Masks?)
I tend to use a VRayWireColor pass or a MultiMatte pass for this purpose.

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5. how can i complete automate the rendering process? so that i can render all 25 images in one fly? My solution about rendering in one go would be with the timeline...
For this I would also look into State Sets or RPManager, both allow you to schedule renders and change cameras and scene elements on the fly.

I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions or anything needs clarifying.

Many thanks

Paul