Foliage and Trees

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  • I know that trees are hard to do but they can make or break the render when it comes to natural landscaping. The current trees are fantastic compared to what Revit offers but I'm wondering if Enscape is working on making them more realistic. Especially the conifers. They feel a little like a prehistoric rain forest.

  • sjrobinson High poly trees, especially conifers would have to be very high poly, slow down the performance extremely and are useful for renderings only.

    The current trees are optimized for real-time rendering, so that they're looking quite good and won't slow down the performance too much.


    In SketchUp you could use Skatter to load more high poly trees into your model.

    In Revit and Rhino there's not much you can do right now. But we have this topic on our agenda.

  • sjrobinson
    In SketchUp you could use Skatter to load more high poly trees into your model.

    Does Enscape handle components from Skatter differently than normal Sketchup components?


    For example, if I place 100 identical trees, does Enscape render 100 trees? Or 1 tree and mirror it 99 times?


    Is there any difference between using Skatter/Proxies/Sketchup components in terms of performance?

  • Skatter provides a way to place components into the model, without actually placing them. But, the component is still placed onto an invisible layer, and is thus embedded in the skp file itself.


    Enscape proxies are components, that have no geometry on it's own, but link to another skp file instead. The main model stays small.


    You can combine both features and place Enscape proxies using Skatter, so the model stays small, the geometry is loaded from a different skp file, but the proxy exists only once in an invisible layer and is placed using the Skatter mechanism.


    In all cases, Enscape has the geometry only once and renders it multiple times in different locations. (Unless you create two proxy components linking to the same file or you have similar duplicates in your model.) So the performance in Enscape is the same, but SketchUp itself is more responsive if you use proxies or Skatter or even both.

  • In Revit and Rhino there's not much you can do right now. But we have this topic on our agenda.

    For Rhino users I recommend Lands Design. It is a free program that is in beta program that will add foliage into the model (you can filter out to the render-able models) and it has almost zero performance impact. I just made a rendering with over 300 mature live oaks and it looks fantastic.


    http://www.lands-design.com/download/