Volumetric Tree Material

This seemed like a cheap solution to foliage…think I will experiment with it some more.

interesting :)! so the leaves are just a sphere with a volumetric material? can you post the node setup?

I didn’t use nodes, but I think I may try it with nodes. Here’s the blend if you want to check out the material…
volumetrictreesE1.blend (612 KB)

I wonder if this will prove better for large areas than instances? Drawback is lack of spec on volumetric surface?

This looks good and renders fast! Did you also test this with cycles?

Thanks. No I have not tested yet with cycles. I am going to fool around with it a bit more today, maybe try it with cycles and/or try to flesh out a large scene and see if my cpu melts or not.

I remember that thread, but I couldn’t remember who started it. Figures that it was NRK. Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to do this with cycles at the moment, because cycles doesn’t support voxel data ( yet ).

nice to see you guys testing arround with things like that. Don`t know but I like varkens addon a lot… And I believe this will become a great addon. I mean it is a great addon at the moment but with all your knowledge and knowledge inside the comunity… thats nice about blenderartists but sometimes a bit difficult to me. Have to learn a lot but all this things are realy cool.

Here’s the problem scene after I adjusted the light cache value…looking much better now.
however it took a few more seconds to render. The original version took literally about 2 seconds, this one took about 7 seconds I think. Still not bad for a scene full of trees.


not bad??? that’s great approach. this will be very usefull for aerial archiviz

Maybe, but when I did an animation test a moment ago, I got some flickering, so I will see if I can track down a way to minimize it.

hmm, cycles in painfully slow. 8h render time for this liitle scene! 128 samples:



.blend: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/27955

thanks to leonardoe for telling me how to get the trees pointing strait up. so basically its leos technique with volumes (look at ‘simple and qucik terrain generation test’ thread)

i love your trees modron! and amazing 7s :smiley: render time! but i think you should bump up the terrain a bit, flat terrains are boring

thanks. I think there is some script that plants trees only up to a certain degree of slope. I may be imagining this, but I’m pretty sure I saw something of that nature.

Wasn’t that used on the billion face project? The island with lots of tree instances?

yea, but the volumetric version a) doesnt come close to 19 billion and b) takes 8x longer to render :stuck_out_tongue:

Interesting. I have to start to experiment with this node, it can be good for trees too.

Here’s a fast test with cycles. It’s not that slow at all and all depends on how you set it.

Attachments

vol_trees_edit.blend (1.21 MB)

1 Like

Waw the last one looks particularly good !