Hey guys,

I've been trying to make an animation of the camera going through/past trees in a forest.
So I need lots of trees.

Only problem is that I need too many trees that my compy can handle. Is there anyway to create the illusion without needing so many polygons? So far i got like 3 million polygons just from trees. >_<

FoleyPro made a 2d Forrest plugin, but my link to the beast is dead......( so the trees are a couple of planes rather then a 3d object)

Foley? do you know what's happened?

I've not seen Foleypro's plugin so I can't really comment on that but I'm assuming its based on the following principal.
One way to do it would be to render a half dozen or so different looking trees arranging them sporattically, then do a mask render of the same scene, save the two as .jpg. Do this 2 or 3 times with different looking trees each time. Apply these three set's of two .jpg's as a texture to three seperate 2D planes then group. You could then use the multi replicate tool to multiply the number of trees in your scene. This would populate your forrest quite nicely and cut down a lot on the poly's but not sure how it would look when used in an animation. Never really played around with Bryce's animation tools.

Attached Link: http://home.comcast.net/~foleypro/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html

Found Him!

Just downloaded the TreePack. He has some other stuff for free as well.

Hope the TreePack works for you.

I personally like the Billboard trees and plants by XfrogPlants though they are expensive at $15.00.Foleypro also has a  forest kit over at DAZ..It's called Foleypro's 2D trees and costs less than 10 dollars.

Otherwise you are stuck with making your own 2D trees as croowe has suggested or isolating individual tree photos to make your own billboards on individual 2D planes.Or you could just put a whole forest photograph onto a 2D plane and position it in the far background whilst putting a few trees in the foreground to hide the background.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=266155

I dont know if its really going to be a problem? I've made a forrest with thousands and thousands of bryce native trees on a pc with only 512mb of ram. It rendered really fast and without any problems whatsoever! Just lose the soft-shadows, cuz they'll make ur rendering life a living hell haha.

For real far distant trees you could also use a terrain with a noise to the displacement and some matching noisy DTE texture with colors much similar to the colors of your trees. This can be used to create the illusion of far mountains and hills overgrown with loads of trees.
You can see the result of my attempts at:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=266155

Terrific render Rayraz and thanks for the tip about the soft shadows.

That is indeed a nice render, Rayraz.

thnx! its an old one lol. Havent had time to mess with 3d much lately :(

Great work, I reckon if you do another one, adding a boat or a distant eagle (2d) or something like that it would give the scene a point of interest to compliment the wonderful pic. Thanks for the tips. Jen.

Quote - Found Him!

Just downloaded the TreePack. He has some other stuff for free as well.

Hope the TreePack works for you.

I downloaded the file but have problems unzipping it. (can't)

O.K. I got it opened.