Whats currently the best soft for vegetation modeling...?

Jonathan85

Whats currently "the best" modeling software for vegetation (plants, trees, bushes, etc. etc.) for both usage - like real time (games) (low to middle poly) but also for still/video renders (mid to high poly).

My main modeling application is 3ds max (renderer is vray).

The top application was speedtree for years. I also know about plant factory and Grow Fx as a plugin for 3ds max... These are the top aplications i know of.

Afaik SPEED TREE is still the best software (to learn if one needs/wants to model vegetation), correct?

Obscura

Yes, I believe SpeedTree is still the best choice.

Jonathan85

Now i remeber that the drawback of speedtree at least few (several?) years back was that it was NOT the most friendly software to make really high polygon tree (no quad low poly planes with alpha masks for leaves, but real shaped model of leaves). Like really high polygon tree hero models for render videos of movies... I now remeber that speedtree wasnt the most suitable application for this useage (cause it had problem displaying such ammount of polygon, not necessary problems with modeling them)...

Has the situation improved and can i now without problems modeled trees with like milions of polygons (1 to i dont know... 5 milion... polygons per tree)...? Has the situation improved ?

Alex_J

You have options with how to represent leaves/fronds/branches. You can use single polygons, or any custom mesh you import. 

Not sure about performance with millions of polygons. Even if it gets too slow for that, the speed at which you can create and iterate on a solid base to start from would make it worth it IMO.