You must return here with a shrubbery!

Procedural plants would be cool in max. Did you ever use Ecosystem in Vue?

Great scene, very vibrant and happy.

It gives me the feeling that its a tiny little gnomes house.

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Matt
http://theprophetmoses.deviantart.com

Thanks, yeah I've got a copy of Vue 6 xstream but I havent got it synced with max properly. I like the ecosystem thing and I've made some nice looking scenes but its mainly the render times that screw things up. Its amazing how many polygons it will render without crashing but unless you have a thousand cpu render farm you'd have to wait a year to see an animation.

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I know what you mean. I used to have a copy of vue5 installed on every computer in my house just to get decent render times.

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Matt
http://theprophetmoses.deviantart.com

Looks cool, certainly more Sound of Music than Texas Chainsaw Masacre. What are the Ivy render times like? It looks pretty complex.

I've tried animations in Vue, it's certainly not quick. I think it's strenght is definately still images.

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http://www.3dprevis.com

the render times are pretty good (about 5 minutes). The meshes arent too heavy but there is transparency on the leaves. not as bad as some of the trees from botanics or treepro though.
I used vray with irradiance map and light cache with a vray sun which does blurry shadows but with that at least theres only one lot of shadows being calculated.

Agreed about Vue, I think its usefull for generating stuff for use elsewhere like maybe incorporating it into a matte painting or using as a background element in a max scene. I've also found that using it to generate colour and bump maps for geometry is kindoff usefull. I'll make a terrain in max then in vue apply a mixed material that uses the altitude or whatever to mix, then export the textures. If you mix them with other maps or use the bump for an extra level of displacement it gives some good variety.

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