using treestorm in V8

[gyroo]

Got a windy tree to do, got an old treestorm plugin... Only works on V6.5 on an old G4 tho. Any suggestions on how to get a movement into V8?

Range export doesn't work as the plugin only updates frame to frame when rendering. I could export each frames model manually (prob as seperate leaves/wood) and reimport as a model sequence, but that would be V time consuming. Suggestions welcome...

Cheers

DaveW

[RichardJoly]

Dave,

This is kind of Off Topic for it will probably not help you but I was reading about Woddy3D when I saw your post...

http://woody3d.com/home/

The technique used by Brian Taylor for his Rustboy movie could be an inspiration.

http://www.rustboy.com/movies/tree.mov

You will find some explanation of his technique here: http://www.rustboy.com/rustweb.htm

Check the fifth plate of the Making of Tab.

[gyroo]

Good links Richard, thanks.

Rustboy one's good, may be a way of doing this. Met him a few years back, nice guy.

Woody one seems quite primitive - a retrograde step from onyx, even tho thats many years old.

Cheers

DaveW

[vic3d]

I would love to know if i can use woody3D with EIAS on a mac. I can't find a demo for mac I can download and I get no answer from them. Richard, have you used woddy3d with EIAS? A client of mine saw an animation with moving trees and is asking me for something like that. I really need this or something like it. I don't have a G4 to use ONYX with.

[KurtF]

Looks like the Woody3D is a development platform to add that kind of functionality, tree generation and rendering, to your own app.

So a 3rd party developer, or EIAS 3D, could buy a license, develop an EIAS plug in, and sell it. Don't know how much effort would be required to do so however. But there are some possibilities there. Especially since Onyx has had trouble with the Mac OS being a moving target.

[vic3d]

Wow, so no options for me to have windy trees in my videos just yet?

There are no other options? has anyone seen some texture maps y could buy for this? like the ones they sell of people in motion?

[Mark Johnston]

Hi Thanks for those links Richard , Woody 3D looks like it would be great if we could get it in eias.

Mark

[WHD]

Hi All,

A bit late on this reply but I have added moving trees on a number of occasions to projects by pre-rendering Onyx trees as moving clip-able textures out of 6.5 . This is because the actual moving storm trees were always a bit of a burden if you needed more than a few.

To be honest I have found that if your camera moves substantially much of the tree motion gets visually lost unless you are rendering out a real storm. Sweeping fly bys do not benefit from subtle tree motion at all. Static or very slow moving shots are perfect for mapped trees. The primary issue is with close up trees where the camera causes paralax in the branches. Here there is no real solution in newer versions of EIAS.

One thought here would be to set up the scene and camera move in an earlier version of EIAS like 5 or 6 and then render out the 3d moving tree or trees there using storm and EIAS's great comping options. Then comp it into the rest of the scene done in EIAS 8 in layers in something like After Effects.

You can of course export the (static) models from Onyx . I did try exporting sequential models but this is very limiting as the cycle function gets rapidly overloaded with the size of a typical tree. I got a single palm tree working using this method but it was very time consuming for the results.

An area I have not explored is morph targets but I suspect that it would be difficult to get a natural looking motion if it will even work at all.

Hopefully one day Onyx will feel there is enough stability on the Mac OS to resume support of Storm in EIAS. Storm was one of the deciding factors back when I first bought EIAS in the early 90s as opposed to other 3d software.

Bill

[vic3d]

Thanks Bill, that is a good idea. That is what I was looking for: animated clipable texture maps of trees. I don't have Tree storm. Do you know if there is a place one can buy such maps?

Thanks.

Vic.

[bbuxton]

SpeedTree Cinema exports animation via Point Cache or Skinned Skeletal Data (????)

It would be nice to see a way of supporting this or perhaps something to work with XFrog xfr data.

I too really miss Onyx Treestorm but with little or no activity in regards to Mac or anything outside of 3dsMax in a decade I think this ship has sailed.

I'm looking to replace the Treestorm with SpeedTree in the not to distant future, if nothing else so I can move on from SnowLeopard. So support of its animation would be terrific.

[Tomas Egger]

Ola BB,

This render is using Speed Tree:

http://www.eias3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Speed-Tree.jpg

But a direct connection is interesting :)

Thanks

Tom

[supernovavfx]

this feels like a real new 'era' for EI.... I hope we all can push "nicely" for vendors like ONYX and of course EI itself to bring these capabilities to the platform.

I would imagine EI will need to sell a few copies and have a solid business model to survive the next 5 - 10 yrs before some people commit the time.... Im "hoping" that with the

new model import system the amount of work on "onyx's" end just may be much less than before... I spoke a number of times with them... (were both croatian) and he told me the

programming time involved to enable EI compatibility was too much vs how many of us out there would buy it.... However, now that the model 'system' is so much more robust and

modern maybe this would result in a much quicker port.... I can DREAM can't I? I had tree and tree storm straight from MacWorld where they sold it years ago and have so many animations

that used it... real flow connectivity and tree would be awesome... id pay plenty for it....