[Radiance-general] Plants, Landscaping, Entourage, and Radiance...

[atelier iebele abel]

Hi Jeffrey,

I have used a tool called Xfrog to generate trees and plants. With Xfrog
you can order different cd's containing sets of pre-modelled trees. I
have translated some of these into OBJ format, and converted them into
Radiance.
The trees are really nice.

Now the good and the bad news:

The good news is that within Radiance I have rendered about 3000 trees
in a scene without troubles ( expect quite long rendering times).

The bad news is that Xfrog - OBJ conversion is not very easy because of
so called "bad vertices" and invalid normals that are generated by
Xfrog, and Radiance does not accept both bad vertices and invalid
normals.
Therefore I edited the 100MB+ obj files virtually by hand ( using search
and replace in vi, a text editor), to remove all errors: very much work!

There is also Bad News II : I did not succed in getting the mapping of
the bark and leaves right.

If there is anyone in this list who can help you (and me!) to make the
conversion between Xfrog-obj files and Radiance smoother, you will have
a very nice tools with Xfrog.

-Iebele






Jeffrey McGrew wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm still a Radiance noob, and am just
> getting my feet under me in using it, and
> I understand on a base level the advantages
> and abilities of it.
>
> What I'm wondering is how to deal with
> things such as landscaping, people, cars,
> and other such 'Entourage' items when
> producing design visualization renderings
> for projects.
>
> I'm concerned that modeling these items
> whole, and including them within the
> scene, will add too much complexity to
> the project and greatly increase
> rendering times on large exterior views.
>
> Many 3D programs allow for 'lightweight'
> objects to solve this problem. Accurender
> auto-generates trees & plants on the fly
> fractally, and Max/Viz allows for 'RPC
> Content'. However (and please correct
> me if I'm wrong) there aren't any
> Radiance add-ons to auto-generate
> plants and/or allow for RPC content.
>
> Does everyone typically have these
> items as whole Radiance models, instanced
> into the 'scene'? Is this not a problem
> due to Radiance's render engine's differences
> from other 3D packages? What about the
> repetitiveness apparent in an image when
> the same tree/bush/person/car is used
> over and over and over again? I see
> some exterior renderings on Visarc's
> website that have wonderful looking
> trees, does anyone know how those
> were done?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeffrey
>
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