Trees

[Anonymous]

Has anyone any experience of using Marlin Studios "Tree Farm"?

http://www.marlinstudios.com/

They look really excellent with low polygon count too.

Trouble is, they come in .obj .max and .iwo formats and it appears that we have to convert them to .3DS to get them into ArchiCAD.

No problem, you may say, except that to get the low polycount tree a group leaves are on a polygon that relies on alpha channel use. See:

http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/archiguide/AlphaChannelinTextures.html

Has anyone had any succes with this?

Hope you have and can get back to me.

Steve

[Anonymous]

Hi Steve,

They look good, but I should imagine the texture alignment would be lost on conversion, and the alpha textures would not appear in elevs/section, just the crude outline of the 'branch' polygons.

Dwight and others apparently have had some success using the Onyx trees split into two parts.

Here's a thread about importing objects which may be useful -

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=123343&highlight=tree#123343

I also believe people are bringing trees and entourage directly into Artlantis and C4D to render with even better results. I don't know for sure if the formats you mentioned are directly importable into the renderers, but I would have thought so.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that Peter, very useful.
I've been using the Bank Holiday to play around a bit and I can import the trees I have into (a demo version) of Autodesk's 3D Max complete with all channels (including the alpha) which renders just as it should in 3D. I don't know enough about the app to do much more with it. You have to specifically enable the alpha channel to get it to render properly.
Maybe I have to do something similar when getting to grips with the ArchiCad renderer. I'll explore the links you sent in more detail and try to understand it; it looked helpful at first read-through.
These formats seem such industry standards that I am a bit surprised with the lack of import options in ArchiCad.
I have a sneaking suspicion you're right about how they will render in elevations as the alpha channels only seem to kick in when the rendering engine is used.
I'll post the results of my labours.
Many thanks.
Stephen

[Anonymous]

I'd like to get intelligent GDL-trees so I wouldn't need to use external renderer. If someone just made a couple of diffrent kind of low-poly trees with that random stuff and likes. I'd be ready to pay for that kind of a object.

[Anonymous]

Mudshark,

The versions of ArchiCAD from 10 upwards all have much improved GDL-based trees. Have a look under 'Site Improvements' - 'Garden' in your object library. There are a variety of trees of differing proportions that you can adjust to suit your needs.

Slightly annoyingly they still suffer from some texture distortion on the branches, but they look OK from a distance.

Also check out the trees in the object depository. There are some in the 'garden works library' that work well too.

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/object_depository.php?browse=Depository/02+Sitework%2FGarden