3D trees options

**Buffalo Bills** · 09-14-2012, 10:33 PM

To anyone,

Looking for the best 3D trees and bushes that look very realistic and aren't too taxing on rendering time. I know it is a lot to ask because you get one or another. I've been using the free Xfrog trees but I need some other options in my arsenal. Let me know when you get a chance. It is for an animation. Thanks!

Mike

**AubreyM** · 09-14-2012, 11:56 PM

My favorites in descending order:
HQ Plants for Forest Pack
Archmodels
Xfrog

I bought Forest pack pro and love it. The trees in the library are great and the HQ add-on packs are nice too. If you get crazy with the scattering it can slow renders down a bit but overall I have had decent success with it.
My only complaint is that if you turn on the feature that only scatters within the cameras fov you will get trees "popping" into existence as the camera pans around. In all fairness though I have not tried to do an animation since I got pro and it was a few versions ago so it may have been fixed. If you haven't tried forest pack then get the lite version which is free and try it out. The only really big drawback to the lite version is that it will only work on flat surfaces and you are limited to (I think) 3 different plants per forest object.

Archmodels (like volume 58) have some superb trees though some are rather heavy as far as the polygon count goes.

I have had some issues with the xfrog ones but overall they are ok and some are really nice. Not to heavy in poly's for the most part but textures can be a pain.

**Buffalo Bills** · 09-15-2012, 03:03 AM

Thanks Aubrey! Looked at the options and HQ Plants look nice. Might go that route. Going to look into the options a little further thought just to make sure I'm making the right decision. Thanks for your ideas

Mike

**AubreyM** · 09-15-2012, 06:30 PM

Yea, everyone has their own preferences. I struggled with vegetation for a while and now I use a combination to get the look I want.
Here is a small scene that I threw together in a few minutes using a combination of Archmodels, Forest pack and my own.
The trees are archmodels and forest pack, the grass, flowers and weeds are my own models. Everything was scattered with forest pack, a simple HDRI and a vray sun.

**Buffalo Bills** · 09-17-2012, 01:31 AM

Aubrey,

That looks really nice! Especially just putting it together in a few minutes. How big was that rendering and how long did it take to render it. I'm thinking that in order to get HD quality for my animation I have to render it out at 1290 or 1090 or so. Was this Vray or Mental Ray?

Thanks for doing that, They look great!

Mike

**AubreyM** · 09-18-2012, 03:52 AM

Thanks Mike,
I am having way too much fun with Forest Pack at the moment

That one was rendered in Vray at 1024x576 at low render settings and took about 10 minutes.
My machine is an i7 2600k with 16gb Ram.

I created a new scene (see below) and rendered it out twice. The first render was 1280x720 and medium render settings. The render took about 45 minutes.
The second one was rendered at 1920x1080 with ridiculously high render settings and took about 1 hour and 50 minutes. To be honest the difference between the medium and high settings wasn't that drastic as far as the quality of the render went, even the low settings were pretty good and that is what I would go with for an animation.

**neil** · 09-18-2012, 07:14 AM

Nice trees Aubrey. Is it from Itoo Forest Pack or XFrog?

**neil** · 09-18-2012, 07:20 AM

Hey Mike, you can see archicg models once. it seems high quality with great details.

**AubreyM** · 09-18-2012, 01:47 PM

Originally Posted by neil

Nice trees Aubrey. Is it from Itoo Forest Pack or XFrog?

These particular trees are from archmodels but I used Forest pack to scatter everything.

**Buffalo Bills** · 09-19-2012, 01:26 AM

Aubrey,

Those look awesome! Thanks for taking the time to render out serveral options. I tried an downloaded the sample Arch model and it seemed to be VERY heavy. I'm guessing that not all of them would be like that. So tough to make a decision, but I need to make one soon. I'm leaning towards HQ and see where that takes me. Thanks for all of your help. If I can make my trees look that good for my animation then I will be golden.

Thanks Neil! Even though I think I made my decision I will take more indepth look at archmodels for future purchases. I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks again!
Mike