BGauthier

Just reviewed the link. Thanks! And it sounds like you are having a real problem getting VW to export properly. Hopefully they fix it soon. I wasn’t terribly clear in my response. I understand that 3D geometry would slow down the file (so I probably shouldn’t have suggested a Visual Basic plant ). 🙂 I suggested extrusions inside each plant instance in the plant tool because hope is that the simple extrusion could be mapped by twin motion, or some other rendering program upon importing the VW file. I am hoping it can “read” and convert it from a simple extrusion to a higher res plant. You are correct that I don’t want a big file on the VW side. I was hoping to only have a big file on the rendering side, filled with all of these nice, high quality plants. When we use Lumion we pretty much model every plant (thousands) for the purpose of immersive fly-through a such, so I have no worries about the size of the file on the rendering side, but you are right, I need to keep the size of the VW file manageable so I don’t lose time. Clients seem to want to see every angle these days and they love what Lumion can do. What I don’t love is the time it takes for staff to place every plant on the rendering side. I am looking for is a way for the rendering program to semi-automatically “swap out” a simple geometry (or image prop) upon import from VW. If that makes sense. Thanks again!

Thanks Jeff! So that’s what I was hoping you would say - that you can indeed model and texture the plants within VW and export them to a rendering program and have them already “placed”. We are expecting it to take some time to set this up properly, but for us it is pretty vital we can do this. Now a couple more questions: - You can place the 3D assets using the “Plant Tool” in VW, correct? Any comments on the best way to go about this? Should we use image props or Visual Basic or just simple extrusions? Each VW file will have hundreds or thousands of plants! 🙂 - You then export as C4D - You mentioned some issues with VW rewriting your plant alphas. Would you mind explaining? And this works in Twin Motion? That’s good to hear because I was really hoping to go with a program that works with MACs. Thanks again for all your feedback. This is a really big decision for our office. PS. Great video!

Our office is currently using Lumion for 3D rendering. Staff love it’s video game like real time rendering (perhaps too much??) but I am questioning the time it takes, primarily because it blows up our project budgets. What I feel would work best for our office work flow is a program that allows us to convert the thousands of plants that we lay out using the plant tool in VW into 3D “assets” that the rendering program can read automatically. This way our staff don’t have to spend countless hours re-placing thousands of plants. Is there a rendering program out there that does this? I have been considering Enscape, Twinmotion and C4D, but what I think our office really needs is this feature. Is it out there?? Bryce Gauthier Principal Enns Gauthier Landscape Architects