What is the best way to have really nice looking vegetation in an animation. It is going to be a lot of it, a small city with a lot of trees and flowers and bushes in it. I would love to use Tree Pro, but it seams it doesn’t work with the latest version of EIAS.
Well, TreePro comes with loads of leaf textures, but if they don’t supply one that we need, we just take the photo ourselves (or find it on google).
Using UV textures takes up no more ram at all, BUT, using UV clipped leaves is very slow to render. Though it looks great close up. So if a tree is middle distance or far away, it is best not to use UVd clipping textured on the leaves.
Google 3d warehouse has lots of 3D trees you might want to use if you need a low-poly solution, export from sketchup as FBX, 3DS or OBJ and then import into EI.
Looks a lot like “TreePro” from Onyx. But with a simpler interface.
There do not appear to be any polygon resolution tools, so a big tree will be in the millions of poly’s, with no way to reduce the geometry count.
It looks like it will even animate the tree in the wind and export a sequence of OBJ models (which EIAS can use with child model cycling).
For $85 it could prove be a very useful and affordable tool.
I would be interested to see if anyone jumps in and does any animation tests with this
I am trying but I do not know how I am supposed to apply the texture to the leaves. I am using the sample model they provide. Not a very good looking model.
The leaf polys need UV space. Unfortunatly Transporter cannot import these UVs, so You’ll need obj2fact or any 3D app which can handle UVs.
I tried it this way (because I don’t have obf2fact):
-Import the obj.file into Blender 3D
-Export as obj.file with UV
-Open this obj.file with Transporter
-Save it as .fac
This file imported in Animator has UVs which are working for the leaves.
It looks like it will even animate the tree in the wind and export a sequence of OBJ models (which EIAS can use with child model cycling).
Being relatively new to EIAs, would you care to ellaborate more on this? So I could export fluids from Blender as an OBJ sequence and render it in EIAS?
Being relatively new to EIAs, would you care to ellaborate more on this? So I could export fluids from Blender as an OBJ sequence and render it in EIAS?
That’s correct- from the manual p404-
“Sequential replacement of the groups in a hierarchy can be initiated by
turning on the “Enable Child Cycling” check box in the parent group.
When the scene is rendered, the parent group will be rendered the first
frame and one of its child groups will be rendered at each subsequent-
frame.
The parent will be rendered on the first frame, the first child group will be
rendered on the second frame, the second will be rendered on the third
frame and so on. When there are more frames than child groups, they will
cycle back to the parent. “
Just set up your hierarchy with frame 1 being the parent object, and other objects in sequence… open the group info window for the parent and go to the “Cycling” tab for the playback controls.
Well, that worked great, only one problem. Blender exports the OBJ files as separate files in a numbered sequence. I couldn´t find any way to import all of them at once. So I had to do it one by one, which gets tedious if your simulation contains 2-300 frames or more. Is there any way to import/convert all these files in one go?
Can’t you just select all the files and double click them, once your project is open? In OS X selections made in Column view maintain their selection sequence, and import in that order (not sure on PC).
I mean selecting from the system level, not in the program. With the project file open, just open the folder your files are in select, all the facts, and double click (or right click open).
