Forest Pack

Forest is a plugin for 3D Studio Max and 3D Studio Viz, designed to give a complete solution for creation of vast surfaces of trees and plants. There are other plugins that allow you to create beautiful trees (with thousands of faces), but only Forest enables you to create a complete forest with thousands of trees using only a fraction of the resources.

Some of its features:

• The plugin is a parametric and animatable object, optimized for speed. It can create more than 500,000 tress per second on a Pentium IV 3Ghz.
  


• Trees are created as textured planar objects, so they need very few resources and they are rendered very fast. However, you can use custom meshes if you'd like.
  


• Forest uses splines to define the areas to plant the trees. You can use multiple splines to define areas of inclusion and exclusion.
  


• The distribution of trees is managed with bitmaps. You can create custom distribution patterns, from lines or very regular groups to fully random surfaces. The plugin includes some sample distribution maps but it will also accept user created maps.
  


• Forest can be linked to a camera, so that all trees will be facing perpendicular to the camera. This solves the problem of seeing planar objects from different angles when the camera moves past them.
  


• To minimize resource utilization, tree distribution can be restricted to the camera's field of view. This enables the user to create a fly by of a forest of virtually millions of trees, without wasting scene resources on trees that are out outside the edge of the frame.
  


• Automatic distribution of trees over any surface (irregular terrains, etc.)
  


• You can limit the elements in surface by ranges of altitude and slope.
  


• Material IDs may be fixed or randomized in a user defined range. This creates the appearance of different types of vegetation within a single forest object.
  


• Random transform of position, rotation and scale.
  


• Custom level-of-detail allows for faster redraw in the viewports. You can set different levels for viewports and render.


• Use our free XShadow plugin for opacity mapped shadow casting on tree objects without using raytraced shadows!


• You can also use Forest as a generic and enhanced scatter (no trees after all). Visit the image gallery for some samples.

This plugin is shareware, you can download and freely use the unregistered version (Forest Lite), but the following features are only available in the complete version (Forest Pro):

• Custom meshes


• Exclusion splines


• Following splines


• Random ID materials


• Surfaces


• Custom distribution maps


• Random Tint


• Raytrace Shadows

More detail : ItooSoft

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