My Vue 4 animation already has 1500 trees, and is, not surprisingly, crippling my system. So, two questions 1) I'd like to apply some sort fo Forest Material to hills that are far from the camera, as I sigure a fake forest will be undetedable that far away, especially snce the camera is always moving. But I can't find any. Does anyone have advice for making (or downloading) a material that looks sort of like a forest from far away, without actually building every tree? 2) Any advice on managing such a large number of trees? Do you know how I can make them not completely tank my system (500 mb ram g4 dual processor)? Also, for the next animation i will have to kill every single tree (make them dead tree). Is there a way to apply a new tree to every tree at one time. I don't relish the prospect of individually killing 1500 trees. I have gotten myself intoa bit of a fix. Any tips? Thanks! C

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Use alpha planes :) How many polys do you have going with that many trees???? My word...I have a P4 with 2g of ram & my system tanks close to the 25mil. poly count. I've never even come close to that many trees!!!! ~ Shudders at the thought~ Check out this link.

Message edited on: 07/26/2004 19:04

Message edited on: 07/26/2004 19:08

You could allways try the distant forest material in the miscellaneous collection. videodv.

hey guys ! distant alpha planes !! and you can create a fake forrest with 1.500 tree without problem.

you could place them in sepparate layers and hide them, your computer wont read them, so no speed loss. i use this to create scenes over 100 milion poly's. and i only 512 mb ddr amd athlonxp 2800+ adn a geforce 4 mx 440

Thanks! I am in the midst of trying out each suggestion; I shoulda come here sooner, after dealing with weeks of click... read a page from my book while the Mac frisbee spins... drag... read another page from my book while the Mac frisbee spins.. etc. So Thank you for all your help! I'll tell you how it goes once I've put them all into play. -C

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=534772

There's an even better tutorial at the bottom of that one. I found it much easier than creating your alphas in an image editing program. You can do it all in Vue!

The trick is getting your tree lighting right so it doesn't look too washed out like in this pic. I haven't quite mastered the lighting yet, but it's still nice to be able to make alphas so quickly in Vue.

BTW, the grass is a free sample from Marlin Studios. They have a huge collection of trees and plants with alpha maps. Here's a link to the freebie page: http://www.marlinstudios.com/samples/sampvtf.htm