SpeedTree Test

Thanks Kirt. I have the studio edition (for vfx). Its a pretty slick package. The tutorial video's on their site are worth a glance if you need to generate custom foliage.

Nice render! I noticed that SpeedTree has three different editions, video game, cinema, and architecture. What edition were you fortunately able to get a license for?

I would agree with you that in the past, most of the SpeedTree stuff was geared for real time engines. Now, there are options for importing any leaf geometry imaginable... the presets are pretty good too. If I wanted, I could create a nice low poly leaf mesh and import to SpeedTree and scatter it about my branches... Actually, I think I'll do that next. One big advantage is that you can control the poly count so you can create high poly and low poly versions of the same tree and use multiscatter to distribute the meshes according to the camera position. Another time saver worth mentioning: the very fine twigs and branches are actually texture maps to save on polys. The leaves can be intelligently scattered about these twig maps to create very realistic convincing geometry.

I see, if you Use VRay or Mental Ray yes, alphas are hard to rasterize, I was asking because some of the samples that I have seen of Speed tree, they all look like "Game engine trees" when the camera point the edge of the leaf they all disappear or look very stiff; now if you use geometry this is less noticeable because they all point in different directions. But in your sample they look very good actually maybe is that gravity that you mentioned that make the bed of the leaf more random. pretty good.

I heard that using geometry rather than alpha cutouts are faster, but I've been having pretty phenominal render times. 2000px x 2667px = 2hrs on Intel i7 2600K 4 core @ 4.3 ghz/core - not bad for that much geometry.

Thanks Francisco! The leaves are alpha maps on cards that I have applied gravity to (to get them to droop slightly).

Cool image, the leaf are actual geometry or alpha maps,