Trees, no Lots and lots of trees?

[Ron Schatz]

First post on any board

I have be LW from 3.1 on up to 7.5 heck I've teach it to friends and students.

The prob is trees new job needs to cover buildings up with landscape plan, I need two hundred or so tree mods and am making forest map bg. I made the trees in smaller groups of 5-12 polos treegenerater current ver. and leavegenerater as well, to get the tree shape and size I need then pt cloned and made 9 groups of trees. In Layout load buildings, ground, and set lights and camera 4 shots, save then loaded in tree groups.

OK PC is, AMD2700+, 1 gb hardmemory, wildcat vp 870, windoz 2000pro

lets say flushing 10-12hrs is not good.

In photoshop I cliped in the by hand, so I've got my stills, but I am go to need to animate this beast some how and soon!

Ideas?

thanks reading Ron

[omeone]

Your main problem is getting LW and the hardware to cope with this?

If you absolutely can't get away with lower poly trees for the background (ala Dave Jerrard's (http://www.animationartist.com/2000/Tutorials/LWTrees/lwtrees.html) style) or Dave Tracey (http://www.newtek-europe.com/uk/community/lightwave/tracey/1.html)(DT - recommended)

Then you'd probably need to buy HD_Instance (http://www.happy-digital.com/instance.asp) from happy digital.

[Red_Oddity]

Are you using transparancy in the tree textures (leaves)?
That also pushes rendering times to rediqulous amounts (LW + Transparency = big friggin' no no)

Instead of using transparancy in textures use clip maps...make sure you don't use UVs though as LW can't seem to handle that aswell...

[trick]

Originally posted by Red_Oddity
...make sure you don't use UVs though as LW can't seem to handle that aswell...

?????????????

I've been using UV's in clip maps for.....maybe 100 years !!! :confused: No Problemo !!!

[Red_Oddity]

Hmmm...odd indeed...when i use them the textures are always all over the place...

anyhow, just try it all and see what works for you...