What I Learned From This Project

This was an interesting project because the humongous existing trees were a very important part. At first they gave me a crappy photo of the corner with all the trees, but there were two problems. First, the picture was not good. Second, there was no way I could cut out the trees in photoshop to fit in a building behind them. For these reasons I decided to make the tree using Onyx garden. I have never been able to make a good looking tree this big before in Onyx. On this project I think I was successful, and the main thing to keep in mind is that it is going to take a lot of polygons. The branches alone were 5 million. I imported them into max as a 3ds and attahced all the elements together into one mesh. This took a long time, but when I tried to combine them all at once it shot my page file usage up to 21 gigs, and my computer just about melted. Anyway...when I got them all combined together I used a pro optimizer modifier to reduce polys. I believe this is new for max 2010. Works great. The leaves had to be exported seperately and they were another 3 million polys. Once I got all branches combined and mapped in one mesh, and the leaves in another, I made vray proxies of each of them respectively then grouped it all together. Whew! I hit render and I think it looks awesome.

The only other special things I did on this was to render out several different channels. I have a Zdepth for a DOF in Photoshop. I also have specular, reflection, and refraction channels. These I use as a linear dodge over the final rendering to increase any of these things. I often like to have more reflection then actually comes out of the final render. The refraction channel can be linear dodged and slightly blurred to make the windows look like they are really glowing. The last channel I had was a multimatte that seperated out the people for me. I used this to give myself some control over doing some motion blurs on the people.

Thats it. Hope you like the finished image.

Please comment if you think I could have done something better, or if you know of other techniques.