BATting trees and shrubs

[dolsson 0]

I'm interested in BATting some shrubs to put along a riverbank but I cannot find any good tutorials for making trees or shrubs in GMAX.  I can't use LE props because I want to offset them (unless that can be done in LE rather than gmax?).  So can anyone point me to some instructions for BATting flora?

Thanks,

D

[jacqulina 162]

wow this would be a great project

[SimFox 802]

and this is totally irrelevant robot comment again.

Dolsson asks for advise and help if you haven't noticed...

Dolsson:

First of all let's get difference between BATing and LOTing clear. With LOTing - eg all the stuff you in LE (Lot Editor) you work with fixed 2 d images. You can't alter them in any way only move around.

BATing on the other hand involve MAKING new or editing existing 3d model. and can be done with various 3d modeling software mostly GMAX with BAT pack , or 3dsMAX with Bat4Max pack installed. It is however possible to model with other applications like Maya, Modo, XSI etc and then export you model in 3dsMAX/GMAX compatible standard (3ds/OBJ).

Modeling plants could be quite a challenging proposition though... First of all you would have to decide on the level of details your model should have - if you decided to do detailed realistic tree it could be very heavy on GMAX as you model can easily run into hundreds of thousands and even millions polygons. In addition modeling such a tree would involve particle system to generate leaves. Otherwise i can not think of any way to make reasonable amount of them in a lifetime. There are special foliage generating scripts and plugins - most of them are NOT free, but some are. Plus in MAX you can create some trees/bushes with built-in generator - not terribly good but with some tweaking could be passable.

Alternatively it is possible to go "billboard" route - some of the trees available on STEX have been done that way. You essentially have several planes stuck together and rotated relative to each other at a certain angle. Each plane is textures with an "front" view of a tree.

If you have a desire to go the first rout here is quite nice tutorial to get you going:

MAKING A SIMPLE TREE

MAKING A PLANT

both are for MAX, I guess it could also be applicable to GMAX though...

have fun!

[jacqulina 162]

simfox you have helped him and i have said its a wonderfull project could you explain what i have done wrong please thankyou,i am very interested in this project as you should know i like this sort of thing.

[bixel 1,223]

simfox...hahah

anyhoo - trees and flora have been dune TO DEATH!!! on the stex as new prop files. OMG I got loads!!! BSC, Simgoober, CSX, yadda yadda the list goes on. And yet out of all these thousands of trees and flora props nobody has uploaded a 3ds package of their trees and flora models. If somebody...Cycledogg comes to mind, would upload their 3ds files I PROMISE to upload one of my HK Tower 3ds files.

I mean really. My BATs would look so much better if I had some decent trees and flora in the render - but no, I have to use models I get off of some 3ds site with WAAY too many polys ---anyhoo Im dun talking.

[DioAngel 1]

Simfox - you don't have to bring up a huge post, but that was interesting. All she said that's a excellent project you guys working on..

[TheQuiltedLlama 34]

yeah, jacqulina has 15 times as many posts as simfox. If only we could have even more of jacqulian's short generic posts, rather than simfox's long winded posts on expertise in the field of all things 3D

[DarkEldar 6]

I saw what happened before that little edit Llama.......anyway to dollson alot of websites like TurboSquid.com have free trees you can dowload but like bixel said they have highpoly counts but if you're only going to use them as a stand alone tree you shouldn't run into too many problems.

[patriots_1228 51]

.......i think i'll just stay out of this one. dolson-theres some flora availiable with MAX as simfox said, its passible, but you may want to try browsing some STEX trees to see if what you needs there.

[SimFox 802]

Jacqulina - you haven't done anything wrong per se. Apart from that you are perfectly aware what bothers me in your posts... I keep it quiet (almost always) but here it was so out of place that I have again had an urge to see it it was posted by person and not a bot...

Dio Angel,

Of course I didn't.  I could just type some generic nonsense, better still attach it to some keys on my keyboard, or write a little macro that would automatically post them around. And bliss would come!

If you would bather at all to READ my post I guess you would understand why it had to be the length it was, I dare you to SAME MEANING in the number of words Jacqulina uses.

Bixel:

Well my friend plausible trees and low polycount are not compatible concepts...

But as I've been saying before one shouldn't get to scarred of polycount alone. First of all modern renderers like say MR can handle tons of them - millions upon millions, billions even. The only real issue is memory. Memory not only the physical RAM you have but also pagefile - virtual one you system can make on HDD. On 32Bit OS you are limited by 2Gb of total memory allocatable to an application - MAX in this case. In Windows XP Pro you can set special key in registry to make 3Gb of total memory available to an application. With 64 bit systems you can have virtually unlimited amount of memory. At least theoretically. How would applications and OS handle terrabytes of it is a bit of unknown at the moment. But you can also CONSERVE memory in various ways. For instance (pan was not intended) you can INSTANCE your polygon heavy geometry, or better still PROXY or Reference it. this way it is loaded ONLY when particular bucket is rendering it. This way you can render forest of thousands hi-Poly (totally in Billions of polygons) trees in a 32 bit system.

There is an explanation of concept and some practical instruction on (again) Evermotion.org:

PROXY IN USE

And here are some LOW poly (I think) MODELS of trees:

TREES

These are totally free to use!

[dolsson 0]

Thanks for the replies, all, at least the ones on-topic. I have seen many props on STEX, but as I said, I can't use 'em because I need to do offset rendering for my project. So I'm working on BATs in GMAX. I checked TurboSquid, but the gmax models available are lousy; maybe the expensive sets are okay, but I can't spend $60 for a little project like this. I have seen one "billboard style" tutorial, which I may try, but I really want to go the polygon route. SimFox, thanks for the links; they look helpful.

I did find some models on STEX by kd5rax, but I'm hoping I can do better.

If I make some progress with this, I'll share some pics of my efforts.

Thanks again.

PS: I'd be tempted to use the trees in the "trees" link, but the models are .max format so I cannot use them in BAT/gmax.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

You can try contacting the author of one of the props you like on the STEX, and you can either ask if they can send you the files so you can render them, or if they could render them for you, off set.

Flora can be hard.  If you make it yourself it would be a good experience at least.  I've personally never made any complicated flora before (just some deformed spheres and boxes for shrubs and hedges).

[dolsson 0]

Is there a way to access the textures used for the in-game trees? I'd like to get my shrubbery to blend better with those trees and the best way I can think of is to use the same texture or be able to compare it to come up with something close to it?

[SimFox 802]

nope... you can not extract those, as all the props in the game are NOT 3d models anymore - but 2d "billboards"

[dolsson 0]

One of your posts, elsewhere, SimFox, gave me the idea of taking some screenies from the game and using them to create a new texture like what I want. Then I can use that.

D

[bixel 1,223]

Simfox: actually YOU CAN extract them. With ilive reader and browsing through the sc4.DAT1 file I have extracted 3d meshes of cars, some props, it even has the option to export out and save the texture files associated with it. However for the trees, you are correct. They are billboards. However I believe with some decent photoshop skills you can extract the alpha channel texture SC4 is using and with photoshop duplicate - copy/past a couple of times to create a much larger texture. At least then you will have Maxis colors and some variation like maxis has on the texture provided you simply don't create a green square texture file.

BTW, you can pm me if you want those cars and textures - they are useful when using them in a garage-type scene. You can see them in the Sorrento and Dynasty Court I believe. In fact I completely forgot I had them until just now.