Hya Gang-

I know Wolf is laughing as he reads this. But I must know! I simply must know!

Why are trees and plants different from other props?

1. They have no poly face counts.
2. They have no maps - no diffuse, bump, opacity...etc.
3. They can not be Ctrl+Dragged to propagate.

What makes them different from other 3D objects in iClone?

Cathy :hehe:

Just click on the graphic to go there.

Are you sure you have security clearance for that? :exclamationmark:

I really have no idea. I always assumed they were some type of animated image planes (licensed technology maybe) but that's just me talking like I know what I'm talking about... which I don't.

Hope someone will enlighten us on the specifics. Inquiring minds want to know!

...and yes cathy... I know what assuming does!!!!

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I LIVE to anymate, irritate and machinamate. Not necessarily in that order.

So I guess Wolf didn't get the answer from RL...

The following is my take on it, which may be wrong.

When the question came up, my tired brain thought "procedural modeling". in iClone, the plants and trees are moved by the wind, which can be adjusted, and that made me think that they are not your regular polygons with animation. Instead, there is a bunch of rules that produce the model. If it can be done efficiently, there is no need to store the model, it's just generated when required, so it does not add to the polygon count. Ocassionally something goes wrong in the generation: I think that may be the reason that people have reported problems with shadows. I myself had a case where after a scene change the tree had to wake up or something, because it didn't have all its leaves during the first frame of the rendered output.

Here is something about procedural modeling from Wikipedia:

Procedural modeling is an umbrella term for a number of techniques in computer graphics to create 3D models and textures from sets of rules. L-Systems, fractals, and generative modeling are procedural modeling techniques since they apply algorithms for producing scenes. The set of rules may either be embedded into the algorithm, configurable by parameters, or the set of rules is separate from the evaluation engine. The output is called procedural content, which can be used in computer games, films, be uploaded to the internet, or the user may edit the content manually. Procedural models often exhibit database amplification, meaning that large scenes can be generated from a much smaller amount of rules. If the employed algorithm produces the same output every time, the output need not be stored. Often, it suffices to start the algorithm with the same random seed to achieve this.

Although all modeling techniques on a computer require algorithms to manage and store data at some point, procedural modeling focuses on creating a model from a rule set, rather than editing the model via user input. Procedural modeling is often applied when it would be too cumbersome to create a 3D model using generic 3D modelers, or when more specialized tools are required. This is often the case for plants, architecture or landscapes.

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