I’m trying to produce renders of large landscapes with many plants & trees (specific species), landscape details, and am trying to increase the quality of render.
Currently, I can create reasonably realistic outputs, but want to increase the quality. Currently, my process is:
Create efficient mesh from contours and delaunay. The mesh is often around 2 square kilometers.
Where I want more realism is in plants (instead of 2d png cutouts rotated, but I want to create specific species), grass, and ability to control the random details seen in nature. For this; I think that I need to learn Unreal Engine, or something like V-Ray; perhaps some 3d plant generation tool.
Can anyone chime in on what their thoughts are? Custom species, grasses, ability to add and render thousands of plants, high detail meshes.
I’d look at Twinmotion, you’ll need to have an epic games account installed which will allow you to use both Unreal and Twinmotion, Twin has a direct link to Rhino, it’s really easy to use and has a brush function to populate your landscapes with all sorts of grasses, plants and trees has an awesome library of objects. It’s pretty amazing I hear D5 is nice too though I haven’t used it.
Unreal needs a bit of learning to be up and running it’s a game engine so it’s not like other 3d programs but you’ll have it anyways once you sign up with epic games.
Nice work on your landscape, it will import nicely into Twin and you can even add water, real skies, roads with moving cars and more plants, the rendering is fast but you have to have an RTX video card to use it also has easy animation and panoramas.
Edit:
They just released a new version looks like it has some nice additions like support for Rhino camera views and support for virtual camera control via your phone or tablet.
Really appreciate your reply. Just wondering what if I wanted to make a custom tree with LOD? I was thinking that UE would be powerful if I can learn it, because you can do a lot with it?
Yes you can do that in Unreal but you have to have several models of varying geometry count and (I think texture maps if you wish), each one for a different LOD.
For tree modeling it’s expensive but Speedtree is what many in the industry use. It’s made for only modeling 3d trees, Unreal supports Speedtree import. It makes the LODS and adds animated parameters so wind will work on the foliage in Unreal. Both in Unreal and Twin the actual 3d assets and scans are so immense that I don’t model foliage anymore, plus most all the foliage animates in real time with wind and rain/snow time of year. Try out Twin because it’s much more integrated with Rhino and will give you a taste for some of what Unreal will look like. But yes get into Unreal it’s a steep learning curve and takes tons of drive space but the results are quite good especially animation. Blender is great too I use it along side of Unreal and it’s much more Rhino like.
Edit…
This might be for you I see Unreal 5.7 has this new foliage editor…
The Procedural Vegetation Editor! This new Experimental plugin enables you to add assets from Fab and use them as starting points to grow, shape, and customize Nanite-ready foliage directly in the Unreal Editor. You can create and customize vegetation in real time, without having to round-trip with third-party tools and procedurally assemble them into unique tree variations and forests.
Built on a PCG-based node graph, it empowers you to sculpt trees with gravity and scaling, refine leaf and branch layouts, swap models with ease, and export as skeletal or static meshes. With the ability to generate endless variations, you can quickly build a rich library of unique vegetation for your projects. Make sure to also stay tuned for the new Quixel Megaplants assets on Fab coming with the full 5.7 release to start your workflows!
Speaking of vegetation… Nanite Foliage is shipping as Experimental,
RM
