Randomising Procedural Objects

[Paul Roberts]

Post your questions and comments here about the Randomising Procedural Objects tutorial.

[Rokas]

Hi, great tutorial, and superb capability for v5 to stop animation as it was my first concern when I saw the method.

Two notes though:
1. To be fair Your before image wouldn't look nearly as bad if only You had turned on randomizing Transforms (rotation and scale).
I understand You did that on purpose to exaggerate the power of the feature presented in the video but cmon.. (other forest objects had rnd transforms on)

2. For me start.max does not render correctly,- with washed out colors. (I adopted files gamma settings)
Final.max renders correctly. And I cant find what is different.Oh. I see, I should adopt final.max settings and keep those opening start.max

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Rokas,

Thanks for the feedback. As always this tutorial was in response to a regular request we get from users to randomise GrowFX objects but I take your point and you're right of course that randomising transforms covers up a lot of visible repetition. Using the Transform controls was also an important  part of the tutorial, I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was using them. My aim was to show how all types of randomisation can help,  including scale, transform, materials (mentioned briefly at the start), and for those times when you need it, by sampling the source geometry.

Thanks!

Paul

[Rokas]

don't get me wrong I learn a lot with every video and I watch them twice or more,- this is great resource to deepen my knowledge of the plugins,- the same with this video,- packed with great tips.
And we even get sweet  bonus with most of the tutorials- great  3d models (haven't seen anyone thanking for this, so I would like to do that now)

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Rokas, No worries. All feedback is very helpful and I'm pleased you find the tutorials useful.

Cheers!

Paul

[Tryharder]

I get an error on opening that tutorial ... error loading aspen

in forest lister i see that fp-trees uses aspen ...

max 2016 ... forest latest version ... growfx latest demo for 2016

any idea ?

thanks in advance

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

I think this is due to the Grow FX demo version which has the following limitations:

- Conversion to editable mesh and editable spline is disabled;
- Copying and creating a second GrowFX object is disabled;
- No more than 5 paths can be created.

There are multiple GrowFX objects in this scene which is likely to be the cause of the error. Also as I recall the tree has more than 5 paths.

Apologies for that. For testing purposes you should be able to swap the tutorial geometry for a simpler model from the GrowFX site. You could also try Opening Each GrowFX object one at a time in a new scene and exporting them to V-Ray Proxies (I haven't tried this with the demo, but it might work). You can then swap these for the GrowFX objects in the tutorial.

Many thanks!

Paul

[Tryharder]

... thanks for the info

 

[mnijland]

Hi,

I've downloaded the result of the completed tutorial and while I can see the Aspen forest pack changing when I toggle the animation on and off, the actual changes do not appear to translate to the actual render. It doesn't appear to matter if I'm doing an interactive or a proper render with a camera, it still won't render the different GrowFX variations. However, when I turn the display to show the actual mesh and then collapse the forest pack down into an edit poly it does use the different GrowFX variations, so it is definitely picking up on the animations.

Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm using 3ds Max 2018, Corona 1.7, Forest Pro 5.4.1 and GrowFX 1.9.9 SP5

Thanks in advance!

[Michal Karmazín]

Hi,

I'm afraid, as mentioned in this tightly related post: "Renderers that use our custom interface are not currently compatible with the Disabled, Random Sample, Random From Map, and Frame from Map animation modes. This limitation affects Corona ... "

A possible workaround would be to have few copies - samples of used Custom Object(s) created "manually" (instead of being automatically created by Forest's Animation modes) - "shift" the animation on these and add them as other Custom Objects. The Diversity - Match Color ID on Map feature can be used to drive these items with animation offset.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best regards,

[DN1876]

Hi,

I was wondering if there is any workflow using animated variations of a tree if the tree model is made with Speetree?
Thanks in advance!

[Rokas]

Hi

This tutorial is about animating Procedural Items, that has seed parameter in it.
Are Your trees from Speedtree come with such animatable parameter?
I guess not. Then You can use animation techniques described in this tutorial.

Hope this helps.