Agave americana

[ajroane]

Today I made this Agave plant for a desert scene I'm rendering. I can't share the final image right now, but I like how the plant turned out. I poly-modeled a single large leaf, then I used GrowFX to create the plant structure, using the leaf geometry. Afterwards I unwrapped the entire model, mainly as an exercise, because I had never unwrapped a plant model completely. I'll be playing with it more in the future.

Regards,

Andrew

[ptrain03]

nailed it

[mbe]

This is cool. I just was curious if I could do this type of vegetation with GrowFX because I have to do some desert plants for a client. Thanks for the workflow!

[3DMK]

This is cool. I just was curious if I could do this type of vegetation with GrowFX because I have to do some desert plants for a client. Thanks for the workflow!

 

Of course GrowFX can do this sort of plant & much much more

You also have all the tools in GrowFX so there is no need to model anything most of the time.

Try to use the tools in GrowFX first as they have more options regarding the direction modifiers & affects & are much easy to change & tweak than instanced meshes

I wouldn't worrry about unwrapping for UV's  as it's a lot of time for not much to gain as GrowFX has awesome built-in UV mapping options

 

Cheers

Jamie

[ajroane]

I wouldn't worry about unwrapping for UV's  as it's a lot of time for not much to gain as GrowFX has awesome built-in UV mapping options

Definitely correct, I wouldn't recommend unwrapping a GrowFX model. I only did it on this one because I have a specific purpose for doing so. But it is not something I would normally consider. 

 

Some programs don't work well with overlapping UV's, (so I've heard, I haven't had that difficulty using 3dsMax and Vray) so I'm curious about whether or not others have run into a situation where they were required to unwrap a plant model in order to get correct render results? Is the problem from working between Max and Lightwave, Maya, or C4D?

 

@3DMK - You've got me puzzled about how this could be built from scratch in GrowFX. I'm going to be experimenting...

 

Thanks,

Andrew

[mithcd]

Really nice work! 

[ptrain03]

 

I gave this a shot using the growFX leaf geometry. I think it came out pretty close. However, I think Andrews method is definitely the way to go. I had to make mesh very dense in order to get the spines to look decent, and as far as I know there isn't any way to vary the thickness toward the base like Andrew has done. I had to add a shell modifier to the mesh to get thickness , but I couldn't get any variance in the thickness without a good deal more work. 

 

I put the model in the plant library if anyone would like to take a look 

 

fun plant

[ajroane]

Here's the final rendering with my agave. I also modeled the grasses, lawn, and Desert Willow tree with GrowFX. I did not create the small Palm tree, Sage Brush, and Red-Hot Poker flowers. I wish I could have re-modeled the flowers, they look really CG.

Regards,

Andrew

[ptrain03]

beautiful render, the agaves and desert willow look great !

[Jason Stewart]

Wow, great looking render!  Off topic I know but what did you use for the gravel?  Scattered geometry?  I have had a hard time in the past getting good looking gravel, yours looks great!  Nice work on the plants too, I find that currently plants creation takes about 1/2 the total time for a render or more.  Slowly my library is building up and over time hopefully I will have most of what I need.

[ptrain03]

Hi Jason, 

 

I usually get pretty good results with "Forest Pro" for gravel ( scattered geometry). Its a great plugin and if you don't already have it I would highly recommend it for plantscapes or anything else you might wish to scatter. 

 

Another technique for fine grained gravel material such as crushed granite, etc. Is as follows:

 

1. separate out your "gravel" bed from the rest of the mesh

2. use a "quadify" modifier on the geometry of the bed to sub divide (I think there are actually several ways to do this, I always use quadify, it works but the faces have to be somewhat uniform in size to begin with)

3. use a "noise" modifier on the bed geometry to get some irregularity

4. add a bump map to the texture (or normal map if you have one), and if needed a specularity map as well.

 

still another technique to use would be displacement maps (in vray only, I would not recommend them in mental ray). or even the displacement modifier.

[Jason Stewart]

Hi Jason, 

 

I usually get pretty good results with "Forest Pro" for gravel ( scattered geometry). Its a great plugin and if you don't already have it I would highly recommend it for plantscapes or anything else you might wish to scatter. 

 

Another technique for fine grained gravel material such as crushed granite, etc. Is as follows:

 

1. separate out your "gravel" bed from the rest of the mesh

2. use a "quadify" modifier on the geometry of the bed to sub divide (I think there are actually several ways to do this, I always use quadify, it works but the faces have to be somewhat uniform in size to begin with)

3. use a "noise" modifier on the bed geometry to get some irregularity

4. add a bump map to the texture (or normal map if you have one), and if needed a specularity map as well.

 

still another technique to use would be displacement maps (in vray only, I would not recommend them in mental ray). or even the displacement modifier.

 

Yea, I have multiscatter and I think it works quite similar to forest pro.  The issue I am imagining with scattering something like gravel is that, at least in multiscatter, you can't seem to do multiple layers to get some depth built up.  I have tried just bumps and displacement maps but it never turns out that convincing.  I will have to try subdividing a lot to try to get some depth next time I have to do some.  I guess another option would be to use a particle system to "fill" the area but that will be time consuming it seems.

 

Thanks for the suggestions!

[ptrain03]

Oh, I see what you are saying. It is hard to get depth.

 

If I vary the scale of my stones by quite a bit (5%to 100%) the smaller ones sort of fill in the cracks around the larger ones which gives some depth.

 

color variations also help to prevent the gravel from looking muddy or oddly homogeneous.  

 

I have to show gravel in a job I'm doing this week and If I come up with any good solutions I will be sure to post them.

[ajroane]

Jason,

 

Thanks! Most of what you see is just displacement on top of a plane, which has a noise modifier applied. Exactly like @ptrain03 mentioned. Then, to break that up a bit further, I manually scattered some small stone proxies using the default 'Object Paint' in 3dsMax 2014. I've been asking for Forest Pack Pro for years, literally, but I'm the only rendering guy in my firm, so my requests don't carry much weight. I had to buy GrowFX with my own money, and maybe I'll get FFP for Christmas this year.

-Andrew

[Jason Stewart]

Let me make sure I am understanding fully.  Step 1 is a noise modifier just to give some slight variation in height.  Step 2 displacement mod to match gravel texture?  Step three, scatter some geometry to add some more randomness.

 

Seems to create a very realistic or at least convincing look in your rendering.  I think one of my problems was that I was using displacement in my material so as the gravel got further from the camera the displacement started to fall off and looked oddly flat.  Didn't help that it was a gravel parking strip that was directly under my camera, ultimately we decided to use artistic license for the image and added more planting to replace the gravel...Problem solved haha.

 

Have you  tried using max's default scatter in compound objects?  It works well for simple stuff just doesn't have all the options of the 3rd party scatter plugins.  Since the gravel area is already a separate object it should work ok.  Where multiscatter is helpful for me is scattering grass proxies and stuff like that since I can just use a spline as a boundary without having to split my ground mesh into separate chunks.