Free Xfrog plants too big

[Mattheng]

There are some excellent free plants and trees going on Xfrog but I can't get them into Vectorworks in a sensible way, there is no explicit Vectorworks format.

Free Xfrog plants

3ds works and all the formatting is intact but the files are absolutely enormous to the point where three or more will crash a previously empty file. I have 8gB of RAM and am running an i7 8 core chip, do I need more or am I missing something...?

Matt

[Danielj1]

When importing the .3ds version, unzip the downloaded file and you'll find TIFF files that can be used to make image props in VW.

Dan J.

Edited April 11, 2011 by Danielj1

[Mattheng]

Dan,

Thanks for the response but it's pretty easy to knock up image props from photos of real plants that would look much better than these. The whole point is that they are truly 3D. Also image props do limit you in terms of angles as they are really just billboards, top down views are impossible for example but true 3D models let you shoot from any angle. Which is what I wanted these for.

This is really disappointing as the models are excellent, from what I can see of them, but unusable. Is there really no way to get the 3D models to work in Vectorworks.? I did notice that someone had asked for them to be made available in Vectorworks format in the comments underneath but had not received an answer.

Impossible?

Matt

[NTZeek]

I don't know, but I have had the same problem. I'd love to make more realistic 3D renderings with great Xfrog plants, but I tried and it simply doesn't work with 3ds files. If any one has a solution I'd love to know. Getting any 3D symbols for plants other than those included seems to be challenging.

[bcd]

I'm searching for high quality 2d/3d plant objects.

x-frog seems like a good place to begin however I'm having trouble making useful use of the free sample files offered on the xfrog website.

My conclusion is that x-frog plants are simply incompatible with VW and the best we can hope for is to render a plant in C4d export it as an image file and create an image prop from this.

please tell me I'm wrong...

[Monadnoc]

You're not wrong.

Xfrog plants typically have from 40,000 to 120,000 polygons (for trees). Which is why they look so good. When converting to the .3ds format, those numbers double due to triangulation (splitting a rectangular 3d polygon, or "quad", diagonally down the middle into two triangle shapes). It has been my experience that VW just cannot process an imported model with that many polys. I'd say about 50,000 is the max. But it will crawl. Models with polygons under 20,000 seem to work best. It seems to handle internally created models with high numbers of polys better.

What would help is the ability to import a 3d file format that doesn't triangulate, like fbx or obj. Even better would be the ability to open/import a native c4d file. I would love to have a "Send to Vectorworks" command inside C4D, that opened the file up in VW with quads intact. Even more better would be if VW was coded so that it could handle models with hundreds of thousands of polygons, which is pretty standard for 3D apps these days.

And support UV Mapping so we could scale the models once we brought them in without losing the textures.

Edited June 16, 2012 by Monadnoc

[rDesign]

@JimW- can you move this thread to either 'Troubleshooting' or 'Wish List' as you see fit? Thx.

Edited September 20, 2016 by rDesign