Re: Semi OTish - treegenerators?

[Joe Laffey <joe(at)laffey.tv>]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Morten Bartholdy wrote:

> I was wondering if any of you have experience with external tree 
> generators and importing into XSI... Most of them seem to be able to 
> generate OBJ, 3ds and other formats but the good question is which one 
> provides good UV info for texturing leaves?


We spent a lot of time researching tree generation for a recent Chevy spot 
(on our site). We ended up using TreeCage, a free tree designer for 
LightWave. This is after researching commercial programs like Tree pro, 
and Tree Designer (for LW). Tree Cage produces a SubD cage, which was very 
helpful (though we ended up converting to polys and using poly reduction 
for the final). It took a fair amount of tweaking (and some coding) to get 
Tree Cage to produce precisely what we wanted. But it wasn't too bad. 
TreeCage makes UVs that worked failry well. There was, however, and 
occasional seam that needed to be smoothed over.

For leaves we ended up using the sprite shader on cards. The cards were 
deformed to give curvature to the leaves. We used instanced hair to get 
the leaves on the tree. In the spot the leaves also blow off the tree, 
which was accomplished with particle instances of the same cards.

If you want UVs for the leaves Leaves Generator (from Polas.net) is a 
plugin for LW that will do a pretty nice job of placing your leaves (and 
it makes UVs). We ended up using hair because we needed the leaves to blow 
in the wind. This spot was the worst of all worlds, with leaves needing to 
come off and on the tree, and blow in the wind.

Hope this helps.

--
Joe Laffey                |       Visual Effects for Film and Video
LAFFEY Computer Imaging   |     -------------------------------------
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