Plant Tool and 3D rendering

[BGauthier]

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

[Jeff Prince]

Most of these game engine type rendering applications let you replace objects imported from Vectorworks pretty quickly, depending on how the model is built and exported.  That being said, you can always add 3D geometry to Vectorworks plant objects.  If they are built and textured correctly, they make it over into your rendering software... note the issue linked in my signature though.

 

here’s an example of my results making custom  plant objects and exporting to Twinmotion.  Both methods are labor intensive the first time you do it, having the geometry native in Vectorworks does have pros and cons.

 

 

[BGauthier]

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!

[Jeff Prince]

The 3D geometry you create is put in the Plant Object.  When you use the Plant Tool, you are placing 2D and 3D geometry simultaneously.

You can send plants to a site model surface, so that works nicely.

 

How you do your 3D geometry is a function of the quality you want and how fast your computers are.  I wouldn't us the VB Visual plants, they are far too heavy and they do not survive the trip to Twinmotion.  If you use imageprops, you might have some of the problems I have described in my signature and they are nothing like the plants you can get in your Rendering image in terms of 3D quality.  The video I shared featured 3D modeled plants, not image props.  I'm not sure what a simple extrusion is going to do for you if you desire to have realistic 3D plants 🙂   1000s of 3D modeled plants will cause major slow downs, best to use heavy 3D models in only the areas where you will see them up close, using image props for the background plants.  I think most people find it far more economical to just use basic 2D plants with image props and hire an expert in rendering to produce those visuals instead of trying to do it all natively in Vectorworks.  You can buy a lot of renderings for the time and cost involved in building 3D plant objects in Vectorworks, especially given the fact that the company doesn't seem interested in resolving some of the issues I have been pointing out with alpha channels...

 

Here's a thread outlining some of the drama with alpha channels with both imageprops and custom modeled plants.

 

[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!

[Jeff Prince]

If you are happy with Lumion's plant library, there are automated ways to replace the plants exported from Vectorworks.  Pretty much every rendering platform allows you to do this if you set up your files correctly.  Vectorwork's Plant Object with imageprops are easily replaced in Twinmotion, no need to add an extrude.