Vray and Xfrog/Maxon 3D Plants

[Mayan]

Hi. Do Vray work well with Xfrog trees (normal .c4d files, not xfr) and with "Maxon Exteriors - 3D Plants"? Have anyone tried it? Thank you.

[Walli]

just rendered one or two, but it worked. It looks like you have to use the black-white alpha channel picture (in case of Xfrog mostly something like plantnumberlef_a) as material weight.
If there´s not a separate alpha bitmap, simply load the color bitmap into photoshop and create an alpha texture from that.

[Fluffy]

Howdy,

yes, Vray works perfectly fine with Xfrog, but you have to rework your textures and materials a bit as follow :
- convert your c4d materials using the Vray materials converter
- in Photoshop, open all the textures that make use of the alpha channel or transparency (leaves, usually)
- still in Photoshop, create an alpha of your leaves or whatever in the "Channels" tab, and invert the colors (Ctrl + I with the alpha layer selected)
- save your file as .psd
- replace the tiff texture with this new psd texture

This is necessary because Vray has issues with tiff and its alpha right now, so its is necessary to use another file format for this at the moment.

I haven't tested Maxon exteriors plants.

[Mayan]

Thank you all very much. Maybe it is a tip for developers to make vray better handle tiffs...? ;)

[Fluffy]

They know the issue, and are working on it ;)

[mascab]

both maxon and xfrog have the alpha map inverted for vray.
It would be fine if vray could invert the map in material weight, like cinema does in alpha channel...
it's a long way to modify all tex of xfrog and maxon plants....

[stefan]

for now you can invert reality easy with c4d colorizer shader!
cheers
stefan

[mascab]

how can i do that? :cry:
please... :wink:
thanks!

[Fluffy]

There's a lot of ways to invert the alpha :
- place your texture inside a layer, right-click on that layer and set "invert image"
- use a colorizer with 2 colors, black and white
- use filter shader and invert the High and Low clip values

[mascab]

thanks...
for maxon plants the problem is solved...
now i'm trying to convert tiff textures of xfrog in psd format...

[choppir]

apart from xfrog, what about Onyxtree?
I want to buy a plant/tree generator but i want to buy something good that will work well in VrayforC4D.

What have you experienced is the 'nicest'?

[Walli]

all those little problems have nothing to do with the plant generator or with the geometry, but with the problems that Vray has with some texture formats.

So I guess you can use what you like best ;-) In worst case you´ll have to run a batch to convert the textures.

[Diegoto]

What about if you have to render a large scene with lots of trees (video) that needs to be polygon efficient. Which would be the most efficient in terms of quality VS number of polygons?

Cheers

Diego

[stefan]

i would take vb visual tress, they are low poly and render fast...
not inexpensive though...
cheers
stefan

[rhodesy]

yeah the VB trees are pretty good for speed vs quality. Vray gives gorgeous results on the leaves - much better than when they are rendered with AR.