Anybody use(ing) this Daz PA product: "Forest." ?
Hey folks.
I tried "Swamp" and "Forest Lake" by Andrey Pestryakov, they are very beautiful, however they are not going to work right now for my renders, too resource heavy. What Im looking for is something to make forests but must have a ground prop . So I'm wondering if anyone is using this item:
Thanks
Post edited by HorusRa on
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Comments
do not try forest lake in Carrara it will never load
it is a very heavy scene in DAZ studio too
Hahaha, I know what u mean. I already tried loading it in Cararra the other day. heh, yeah I got tired of waiting and cancelled the load. =P
Yeah it's gotta be pushing some mega poly's.
It's not the geometry that slowed your render to a crawl....it's the transparency mapped foliage. and shadows/occlusion settings.
Turning on Progressive Rendering should speed it up some, but without knowing the shaders used and the lighting used it's hard to give advice on specific optimizations.
This is a large scene, and requires a very robust system. It has 300 trees in it when it loads. So it is quite high poly, even without all the trans maps, as already mentioned.
Right right. =) I should have mentioned that. Yes it is mainly the transparencies, that's what I meant by the bushes. While the thread was about the "Forest" product and not Andrews stuff, I will say that if I remember right I was using a uber environment and one distant light and maybe a specular, though I don't recall right now. Otherwise render settings were set for a test render, that's what was so sick about it. =)
The grass seemed to be the main culprit.....I deleted it, all. I then deleted most of the bushes. anyway. =P
True that.
I have used the Forest in some renders, even multiple node instances of the forest. I do have an I7-3770 @ 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of RAM. It does render slower than many sets, but a lot depends on how you do the lighting. I usually use 1 distant light and the AoA Advanced Ambient light. I could probably speed up rendering if I could flag all the surfaces in the forest and change them to primitive hit mode in the Advanced Ambient light, but I have not bothered doing that since there are a lot of surfaces that would need to be changed.
There is a SR (standard resolution) and High resolution version of the forest. I would use the SR version for most renders unless you are doing closeups of vegetation. If you want to include closeups of a few trees or bushes, you maybe could get the Forest Elements product and put in the high resolution version of the trees/bushes you are doing closeups of into the SR forest.
There also is the Forest Superior product which is even heavier and renders more slowly.
I remember once a long time ago trying the Forest with UE2 and a distant light. That was extremely slow. How you do the lighting is important too.
Very helpful. Thank you. Maybe I should wait then 'or' do as u said and get the lower resolution version. Thanks again. =)
You can also also speed this up in 3Delight by doing a select all, an expand, and selecting all the materials, then ctrl+clicking UberSurface Base from Shader Presets/Omnifreaker (choose selected and ignore so it won't overwrite textures). Then set Occlusion to Override and 128 samples in all those selected mats in the surfaces tab.
Unfortunately there is no such trick that makes it fast in Iray. :p
I stumbled on this thread cos I'm searching for tips on lighting my own woodland scenes...
If you have Carrara, I'd suggest you take a look at scenery by Howie Farkes - http://www.daz3d.com/howiefarkes His scenes all use trees based on Carrara primitives combined with real leaf models (ie no transmaps), plus he has some tree packs too. Using them in your own scenes is real simple. Dartanbeck's Environkit also comes with trees - it's designed more as a "roll your own scene" system rather than ready to render, and he has some tutorials up on YouTube. You can use Howie Farkes trees on an Environkit base, or whatever. It's really pretty simple, and you'll get help in the Carrara forum if you get stuck.
When it comes to trees, or indeed any kind of vegetation in Carrara, the Surface Replicator is your friend. Starting with a terrain of some description (anything from a 1 poly plane to a mountain range or whatever), add a surface replicator and set its surface property to the object. Then parent whatever trees, bushes, grass, weeds etc. to the replicator, tell it how many, and you're done. For placement control, you can use a black & white mask in the replicator's shader.
In true DIY style, here's one I did earlier: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/812012/ The whole scene is about 500ftx500ft (roughly 6 acres in old money), 400 or so trees, goodness knows how many grass/weed/flowers. For that render I made one bluebell prop, and replicated it about 70,000 times. Because Carrara doesn't preview render every single instance (unless you tell it to), there's almost no hit on the main scene designer. Render time for that image was 3 hours with indirect lighting at 1600 x 1000 on an i5 with 8GB. The main speed hit here is translucency on the leaves. There's no transmapping (each leaf is a prop), but without translucency, you lose the dappled shadowing under the trees. I used 3 tree models, with a couple of dial spins on each for variation (9 tree props total).