3d Trees

[philipnoland]

Hi I am new to VIZ and I am having trouble turning on the shadows for my trees. I just ordered these and they are mapped trees not 100% 3D. So, I cannot turn these shadows on because I have no idea how to. What do I do?

Philip

[tstephens]

What type of trees did you purchase? Are they RPC or Bionautics? Or just bitmaps? What company did you buy them from?

I can give you more information when I know more about what you are working with.

Tod Stephens

[cgrover]

We bought trees from 3dtrees. I'm working with Philip on this and we have a huge forested area and it seems like the amount of trees are crashing the rendering. Any other thoughts?

grover

[de-co1]

I trust these are the ones from the company called Visual Environment, Inc. I see that they are diffuse + opacity maps (not RPC etc). Further questions remain:

1 - Are you still having trouble with the shadows, or is that sorted out?

2 - Have you managed to sort out the shadows, but now your rendering is crashing?

If you are still having trouble with the shadows, you can check by right clicking one of the tree objects, select properties and see if cast shadows has a tick next to it. Second to this, ensure that whatever lights have shadows turned on, don't exclude your tree objects in the scene.

Depending on your PC spec, too many trees (with shadows) may indeed be a cause to the crashing. I moved away from VIZ for the very reason that I found it too unstable when it came to complex scenes utilising both raytraced and / or shadow map shadows. Naturally, for opacity map trees, you can't use shadow maps as these won't display shadows correctly through the opacity maps.

You could also render the scene in sections - i.e. Render the full scene without shadows, then render the full scene (trees and all ground planes only on a non-natural background colour - blue screen effect), and where you have sections in your model that require shadows to fall over objects (buildings, cars etc) render these areas separately, switching trees off around these areas, and then composite the scene afterwards.

[Chirag Mistry]

Please see this link,

http://www.archvision.com/tutorials/pdf/RPC_Shadow_Tutorial.pdf

I used this couple of times to create shadows for RPC's...I think this should work for the 3Dtrees as well. Hope this helps