Hi,
I'm trying to make a nice landscape picture, but I don't know how to make
forest. I've tried things like tomtree, but when I try to place several
copies of the tree around on my height field the scene becomes so
complicated (~140000+ frame level objects) even without foliage on the
trees. Does anyone know how I can make simple trees that look realistic so
they can be used for my forest project?

thanx

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Wasn't it mathfan who wrote:
>Hi,
>I'm trying to make a nice landscape picture, but I don't know how to make
>forest. I've tried things like tomtree, but when I try to place several
>copies of the tree around on my height field the scene becomes so
>complicated (~140000+ frame level objects) even without foliage on the
>trees. Does anyone know how I can make simple trees that look realistic so
>they can be used for my forest project?

Paul T Dawson once published a tree generator that created the tree as a
single mesh, which renders very efficiently. It's then possible to
#declare a small number of such trees, and then plant many copies of
each of them with changes in scale. A simple scene containing 8000 trees
takes 39 seconds (26 seconds to parse and 13 to trace).

The trees aren't as realistic as Tomtree trees, but if you're planting
large numbers of them, they can't all be close to the camera, so you
could use Tomtree for the close ones and Meshtree for those further
away.

Unfortunately, Paul's website seems to have disappeared sometime since
1996, and I can't seem to Google any online copies of meshtree. However,
the help file does say "This file is 100% free, public domain, copy and
share with all, etc." so I could let you have a copy.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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Mike Williams wrote:
>Wasn't it mathfan who wrote:
<snip>
>>trees. Does anyone know how I can make simple trees that look realistic so
>>they can be used for my forest project?
<snip>
>Paul T Dawson once published a tree generator that created the tree as a
>single mesh, which renders very efficiently. It's then possible to
>#declare a small number of such trees, and then plant many copies of
>each of them with changes in scale. A simple scene containing 8000 trees
>takes 39 seconds (26 seconds to parse and 13 to trace).
>The trees aren't as realistic as Tomtree trees, but if you're planting
>large numbers of them, they can't all be close to the camera, so you
>could use Tomtree for the close ones and Meshtree for those further
>away.

Just what I did in this image:
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/33124/
Except I used Gilles' Maketree for the foreground and meshtree for the
background.  Not exactly a forest, but quite fast using only three trees
rotated & scaled, and with the right textures they are quite acceptable.


>Unfortunately, Paul's website seems to have disappeared sometime since
>1996, and I can't seem to Google any online copies of meshtree.

Try http://www.netaxs.com/~ptdawson/ptdtree3.htm

RG

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mathfan schrieb:
> Hi,
> I'm trying to make a nice landscape picture, but I don't know how to make
> forest. I've tried things like tomtree, but when I try to place several
> copies of the tree around on my height field the scene becomes so
> complicated (~140000+ frame level objects) even without foliage on the
> trees. Does anyone know how I can make simple trees that look realistic so
> they can be used for my forest project?

You can build and export "tomtrees" as meshes with POV-Tree a very nice 
tool from Gena Obukhov:

http://propro.iis.nsk.su/go/Wshop/tools/tools.html

So you can combine the complex trees of the tomtree macro with the speed 
of mesh rendering.

Hope that helps,

Bonsai

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