Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: designstor on November 18, 2011, 03:36:08 PM

Title: Logistics updating Forest
Post by: designstor on November 18, 2011, 03:36:08 PM
We are trying to do an upgrade of Forest from our current version 3.3 to 3.4.1. I have installed it on a few machines as a test. One very important thing for us is having the ability to load old projects and re-render them to look the same. When rendering with 3.4.1 I am having some issues.

1.   Random distribution looks different. Is there any toggle I can use to switch to the old distribution model in 3.3
2.   In 3.4.1 when using a surface, objects that do not land on the surface seem to be deleted. In 3.3 it looks like they were just not assigned a new height.

These are just two things that I have spotted in my initial tests. I am sure there are going to be lots of other differences too. From our pipeline point of view it would be really useful to be able to use the old forest to render when needed or be able to switch back in some way to 3.3 methods.

3.   Is it possible to have multiple version of forest installed?
4.   Is it possible to switch forest to have 'legacy behaviour'?

I am not sure how we can proceed with the upgrade otherwise. What have other people done to deal with this?
Title: Re: Logistics updating Forest
Post by: iToo on November 18, 2011, 07:31:51 PM

As you pointed out, these differences are caused by the changes introduced between versions.  Unfortunately, there is not way to add a "legacy mode", because most of times we need to rewrite completely large parts of the code, both to introduce new features or improve the performance for some algorithms.

It is not possible to have multiple versions of Forest installed, but you can switch between them easily without reinstalling, only copying some files (and this process may be automatized by a script). The files used by the plugin are described here:

http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/reference/install.php (http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/reference/install.php)

Basically, this includes: the plugin (ForestPackPro.dlo), mental ray shader (FShader3.dll, FShader3.mi) and vray DLLs (ForestVRay*.dll)