Modeling vegetation

[extol]

I made downloaded a bunch of plant and flower models to use in my game scene.
There's probably about 30 models altogether. The problem is after adding them,
my movie now runs a lot slower. I assume this is because of all the polygons
to make the leaves and such for the plants. Does anyone know any good
tutorials for making trees, shrubs, plants, etc. that look halfway decent, but
won't slow down Director too much? Thanks for any input on this!

[The Minds Eye]

Hi Extol,

If you have polygons that make up the leaves of your trees, I'd imagine you'd
have millions of faces in your 3D member.
Yes, that would slow things down dramatically.

My recomendation would be to use a rendered output of each tree (from 3D MAX
for example) and apply each to a number of planes.
You therefore will only have 2 faces per tree.
As you move the camera around you'd need to make sure the trees are pointing
towards it.

As I'm such a nice guy, I've quickly rendered you two trees from 3DS MAX and
placed them on my website for you to download:
[url]www.the-mindseye.co.uk/download/trees.zip[/url]

You might want to scale down the images, depending on how far the trees are
from the camera

Good Luck,
Trevor

[url]www.the-mindseye.co.uk[/url]

[extol]

You are beyond nice! Thank you for the trees and the suggestion. I will definitely try that method. Thanks again!

[The Minds Eye]

Hi Extol,

I've created a very simple Director movie for you download:
[url]http://www.the-mindseye.co.uk/download/3D[/url] trees.zip

It generates 200 3D trees as it starts up.

Regards,
Trevor

[url]http://www.the-mindseye.co.uk[/url]

[extol]

Thanks a ton! That helped out a lot. I am still having one problem. I want
to put the trees into my 3d scene that I exported from 3ds Max. But now the
trees are facing the wrong way (and rotate wrong). I tried changing the
pointAtOrientation, but could not figure out how to make it match the angle of
my scene. Is there a way to make the tree models have the same directions for
up, right, forward, etc. as my perspective view from 3d s max?

[tyree_2]

you can use optimize or multires on your trees in max to bring the polygon
count down and export the trees. as for as the camera. make a camera in max
and do the rotations in max and export that. it wont show in the preview but
it is there. use 3dpi and you should find it easy enough. keep in mind 3d is a
visual medium not a programming one. all the work should be done in the 3d
authoring environment. that will save you a lot of time

here is 3d scene that would have been impossible if I tried to program it in

a very simple test scene, note the camera work, does not use any video
textures standard textures meant to look like a game

[url]http://www.bleed3d.com/tree%20path%206.htm[/url]

[extol]

Thanks for your reply, tyree_2. I will try exporting as you suggested. As for
the rotation, I'm not trying to do an animation, scene, or pan or anything. I
had a plane with a tree image that would rotate to always be facing the player.
It looks very decent and is very fast because it only has a couple faces. I
can do it with a blank 3d scene, but when I try to put them in my 3d scene, the
angles get messed up.

[tyree_2]

may be because there is more than one object and they each have a different
rotation on them. x one object isnt the same as x on another. again if you use
a camera in max doing the motion you want and export that. you wouldnt have to
be concerned with the different values of each objects rotation

[extol]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't see how I can know the motion I
want. The camera follows the player. So I can't tell which ways they are
going to go. The method that The Mind's Eye gave me works, it's just
misaligned with my view.

[The Minds Eye]

Hi Extol,
The problem you are encountering is because of different coordinate systems of
3ds max and Shockwave 3D. In the default 3ds max perspective window, Z points
up, X goes to the right, and Y points into the screen. In Shockwave 3D this
view corresponds to a coordinate system where Y is up, X goes to the right, and
-Z points into the screen.
Maybe you can rotate all your objects in max before you export to w3d?

Regards,
Trevor

[url]http://http://www.the-mindseye.co.uk[/url]

[extol]

Thanks for the info! I figured out how to solve the problem. I put an
up-vector in the pointAt() property for each tree. Like this:

theTree.pointAt(camLoc, vector(0, 0, 1))

Now it has the right angles because it is using Z as it's up. Thanks for all
your help guys!