About Plant texture issues

[小饰X]

It has been nearly a year since using GrowFX to create plant models. During this period, many plants have been made and many questions have been asked. However, there is an important question that bothers me so far, so I will post a discussion here

[小饰X]

I don't know if anyone is like me! After you have created a GrowFX plant, when you want to add material texture, you must always carry out complicated material processing!

GrowFX is only used as a 3d max plug-in to create plants from the beginning, but there is no independent material or map node！

[小饰X]

So you have to use the material editor provided by 3d max to make material maps, or use vray

[小饰X]

Now, you may want to use the substance 3D Designer or substance 3D painter！

[小饰X]

However, You will find that speedtree is much better in material mapping, including color, normals, bumps, transparency, reflection, roughness, and displacement. If you want to use vray or SUBSTANCE 3D Painter, the same is true. But here is an important point. You need to spend more time learning a new software! Sometimes even the effect is not ideal!

[小饰X]

[小饰X]

When you want to achieve such trunk material, it will be much more difficult!

[小饰X]

I hope to develop an independent node for material production!
Although I know it is impossible

[mentor]

Main problem is not in material but in overall workflow. Yes Speedtree is more advanced in this case, it can make complex shape blends without visible seams. I mean blends between trunk and branches. It is not 1 welded mesh like metamesh produces but it's a blend of 2 different meshes but with tweaked normals and smoothing groups and that's why you don't see border between 2 meshes because branch normals are the same as trunk normals in the intersection area. Also SpeedTree makes opacity blending between 2 materials and you don't see a hard edge between branch and bark materials.

 

SpeedTree widely uses 3d scanned geometry and offers automatic blending of procedural trunks with 3d scans and makes smooth blend between materials without visible seams.

 

Yes we need such features in GrowFX as well as fast metamesh. I found some good  papers with algorithms on how to make solid mesh like Metamesh but on GPU. Will send it to Eduard soon.
Metamesh is very very slow and computes on 1 CPU core...

 

Also I think we need some new mesh features like boolean + subdivision to make a fast and good looking solid mesh. But if you need a smooth transition between bark and branch we need separate meshes with unified vertex normals in the intersection area.

 

Anyway, even now you can make good looking result like this

[小饰X]

于 2/20/2023 于 02:46, mentor 说:

主要问题不在于材料，而在于整个工作流程。 是的，Speedtree 在这种情况下更先进，它可以进行复杂的形状混合而没有可见的接缝。 我的意思是树干和树枝之间的混合。 它不是像 metamesh 生成的 1 个焊接网格，而是 2 个不同网格的混合，但具有调整的法线和平滑组，这就是为什么你看不到 2 个网格之间的边界，因为分支法线与交叉区域中的主干法线相同。 SpeedTree 还可以在两种材质之间进行不透明度混合，并且您看不到树枝和树皮材质之间的硬边。

 

SpeedTree 广泛使用 3d 扫描几何体，并提供程序树干与 3d 扫描的自动混合，并在材料之间平滑混合，没有可见接缝。

 

是的，我们需要 GrowFX 中的此类功能以及快速元网格。 我找到了一些关于如何在 GPU 上制作像 Metamesh 这样的实体网格的算法的好论文。 很快就会把它寄给爱德华。
Metamesh 非常非常慢并且在 1 个 CPU 核心上计算......

 

此外，我认为我们需要一些新的网格特征，如布尔 + 细分，以制作快速且美观的实体网格。 但是，如果您需要树皮和树枝之间的平滑过渡，我们需要在交叉区域中使用统一顶点法线的单独网格。

 

不管怎样，即使现在你也能做出这样好看的结果

I hope that the results can be realized in the near future. I think that now GrowFX needs to add some new functions to achieve better results!
However, I can't see any action. Many things have not been realized for many years!

Just a simple idea!