Is it me or are the palm trees in Vue simply horrendous?? The trunks are the problem. They're WAY too thin throughout. Real palms are much thicker at the base and taper up. These are just no good in anything but a very distant shot. Would be nice if they also had a variety of palms as well. Jeff

if you have vue-4-pro you can edit your plants in the plant editor...you can make them as thick as you like and even make new trees...also if you think the textues look bad on the trunk of your trees just scale them down simple as 123

I only have Vue 4 d'esprit, but am buying Vue 5 Esprit. The textures aren't a problem, just the mesh. Maybe someone could edit a palm or two in Vue Pro and put them in Freebies, if that's legal... Here's my idea of a palm tree: http://www.geoffmurray.com/palm-tree-cape-richards.jpg

I think all plants look bad in Vue, except the rubber plant, stangely,and it has to do with the shading ( reducing ambiant lighting gives better results), and you need to work on the size of the procedurals used for trunks (scaling them differently), be it colour or bump. Give your leaves a little blurry reflections (increases render time). you can also change the image map if you have any images of the leaves you want ( must have an alpha channel), and it doesn't always work ( few chances it's gonna work with the palmtree, mut may work with simpler plants). That's all I could find to have better Vue plants (apart from modelling my plants in XFrog, that is!), and it's true they work better in the background. PS:These advice work for Vue5.

give me your email addy and i will send you one in vue-obejt format...or can i send it over here on the vue-forum ?

Deciduous trees look fine until you get up close. The leaves don't "hang" from the branches, they stick straight out like cheap plastic plants, lol. Just no pleasing some people, is there.

lol your of your head...you could use alpha plane for your palm tree or find some really good palm textues other then that you will have to make do with what you have lol

lol, but it's not the texture, it's the shape of the trunk, textures won't help that. What do you mean by Alpha plane? Jeff

I will probably buy the Botanica add-on for Vue 5 Esprit, since that seems to have the same functionality for plant editing as Vue 4 Pro.

yeah that could work...i have vue-pro and vue-5...still cant believe i paid 500 for vue-pro and hardly use it...vue 5 is much better i think but i'm hitting some huge render times kinda kills the mood to be honest

lol, yeah. I found that adding lots of point lights will dramatically increase render times. My sci-fi mining outpost takes 6 hours to render with all the little lights.

Before you convince everyone that all palms have tapering trunks get a good book on palms like Palms Throughout The World by David L. Jones. And you will find that many don't have much taper to the trunk. Some such as certain Phoenix palms actually get biger toward the top. I have palms in my yard that look much like the Vue palms. We don't know what palm imspired their model. And yes some palms are like vines no bigger than your finger, The trunks of these are used as rattan and are commonly 50 to 100 meters long. There is lots of room for good modelers in this area and I think all of us would like more kinds. Glenn in Puna, Hawaii

ahhh the vob file didn't work in vue4 huh bummer...i've had my eyes on "xfrog" you can get some really nice plants and tree with that program...one really worth looking at if you wonna get some good looking veg going on

There is a huge downside to xfrog trees though, yes, they look really really nice, but they have really high poly counts, I know that you can reduce the poly count but I've never seen what happens when you do that (quality wise). They also add quite a bit to render times unfortunately, so definately use them sparingly when you do use them.

I use Xfrog trees, for up close type things...you can always make then into alphas for the background :) I've also saved all my Xfrog models as .vobs...saves time ;) You could also find a texture on the web for the Vue palm trunk/bark & replace it in the materials summary :) I bought a book on trees for this exact purpose replacing barks & leaves.

You have a point with XFrog plants, they take a long time to render. BTW, does anyone know if there is a difference in render time when importing XFrog models in 3ds or lwo? Lwo seems slower, but I'm not too sure. But it's definitely easier to export/import in the lwo format.

Ggrace, it wasn't my intent to generalize ALL palms. I am fully aware of the many thousands of varieties. I believe though that Vue intended this to be your average coconut palm, which as far as I know have significantly thicker bases. In searching the web I couldn't find any that looked like the Vue palms altogether. The top portions, yes, but not the trunks. And then you have the Cycads with short stocky trunks, and the ones that you described that are thicker at the top. But I have never seen any that resemble the ones in Vue.

Attached Link: http://www.mayang.com/textures/Nature/html/Plants%20and%20Derived%20Materials/Wood/Bark/

Yay! More textures to play with! Thanks for the link dlk, not many palm / tropical trees up here in Washington! I'll have to try saving them over as vob and see if that helps (for the xfrog plants). Another suggestion for getting a different trunk, grab a modeling program and do a quick model of a trunk, then make the vue palms trunk transparent and stick the leaves on the top of your newly modeled trunk and apply textures accordingly. There are plenty of free 3d programs (or earlier versions available on 3dworld cd's) out there that shouldn't have any problems modeling something like that. Not quite as easy as pushing the veggie button in Vue but at this point I wouldn't count on E-on updating their plant collection (considering most of those plants have been around since version 2 of Vue, maybe earlier)

Nano..if you haven't already seen he has some awesome skies :)

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 17:45

So much to download, so little time, Thanks dlk! Arggh, download limit, must go back in 3 days!

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 18:33

I should add..he does have a daily limit...so you'll need a few days LOL.

I know this thread is a bit old, but, I bought the Botanica add-on for Vue 5 Esprit, and I'm pretty dissapointed. The options are very limited, depending on groups available within a plant. I was expecting to be able to manipulate plants like you can manipulate terrain, bit not so. So, in short, I can't make the kind of palm tree I want out of the types inherent to Vue 5 Esprit. Can't adjust the taper of the trunk. If I chage the trunk diameter the whole trunk changes, making it even uglier. The claim that you can create whole new species from existing ones is a stretch, at best.

Attached Link: http://dreamp.club.fr/plante1.htm

I know, but a maple with really big leaves and a bit droopier is still a maple. I would loke to be able to edit the trunk and leaf geonemtry, add or subtract points to a leaf, serrate the edges, make them thin like needles, but it's nothing likt that. In all the plants you display on that link I can tell what they came from. I wouldn't call them new species, new variants, new cultivars, maybe.

You're absolutely right, but if you need such fine control in your plant editing, then you need XFrog. XFrog 3.5 is a standalone app, with many export formats. But it ain't cheap!