Lands Design for Rhino and Octane

[Bendbox]

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if any of you are using the Lands Design plugin for Rhino and rendering the output with Octane? I've been doing all of my vegetation using outside obj files from Xfrog, CGaxis, etc. However, this plugin looks much easier than "manually" placing everything. The info on the site says it uses block definitions for the vegetation and that it works with any render plugin for Rhino. Apparently, the detailed tree model is converted at render time, and a low poly one is use for the viewport. Anyway, looks cool, I may download and try, but thought I'd see if anyone here was using it, and if so, what your thoughts were. Thanks!

Video of Lands Design in Use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzJkfSUBFbs

Lands Design website: http://www.lands-design.com/

There's a really nice user project called "Canal Park" that is in the projects gallery that shows off it's capability well. Pretty cool.

Thanks,
Ryan

[sgufa]

+1 for this!

[face_off]

This looks really great. Would love to know how you go with this.

Paul

[Bendbox]

I think I will have some time this week to download and give it a go. I'll report back with my findings.

Ryan

[prehabitat]

Hey Bendbox (& others), sorry for the late reply, I've been sitting on half this post for a while but life got in the way

I've been using the lands design for rhino plugin since WIP#8 or so, just installed the most recent one the other day for a landscape community project I'm trying to get funding for...
Back in wip8 you couldn't render any of the trees (geom didn't convert) I've been rather busy so didn't test the inbetween wips, but the most recent one seems to work really well when using the trees from the built-in 'with render' group (land design dockable panel/tab: Tree tab-> 'Tree' then <browse> and filter by 'with render' group).
There is a decent selection of trees in there, although the 'with render' group pales in comparison to the full tree species list they have; which is to say that AsuniCAD have spent a lot of time entering every bit of relevant species selection data into the software (sorry, I'm a data nerd). you can also rather intuitively create your own trees (to any detail level) and even import thumbnails/pics to the tree database (either custom or pre-set) directly from google image search iirc.
As you said; there is a low poly viewport version, but from what I could see during my quick testing what you place/set is what renders. The Lands properties panel has a global setting for all the trees already placed to swap between 2D (conceptual, graphical, drip line) and 3D (conceptual, detailed (low poly/billboard) and realistic). If you choose the global setting for 3D conceptual that's the geometry that is seen in the viewport and what will render (2d block also renders as lines at the tree's feet which was very interesting). Set global to detailed, that's what renders, etc.

I did notice that the realistic isn't the same as the xfrog stuff.. It seems like the Lands Design 3D options would be great option for your: low, medium and high quality visualisation (ontop of filling ALL your landscape documentation needs), with xfrog filling the very high position in terms of visualisation quality alone. the xfrog leaves are a poly with an opacity map, and a reasonably high quality RGB image of the leaf itself (sometimes several examples of typical leaves). the Lands Designs' stuff seems to be poly with a single shader-like material applied to the leaf poly - but I only looked at two eucalyptus Please prove me wrong!
Don't get me wrong, I love AsuniCAD's implementation, and own VisualARQ (another of their plugins) and would buy lands for the very few projects I would get paid for. Also, I produce (&am paid for) far more non-photo realistic(inc technical) work than photorealistic (many arch firms do, which is why they often outsource photorealistic).

Anyway, I'm digressing. You get LandsDesign excellent scheduling, sprinkler toolset, google maps topography, etc and if you really needed to you could always octane proxy the Lands blocks to the exact species/specimen if someone you're delivering to needed to see it.

Try it out! interested to hear other peoples thoughts (on the software; not my long winded review above - haha!)

[Bendbox]

Hi Prehabitat,

Thank you very much for the great and detailed review. My interest is definitely in the highly photoreal category, as that's my focus for Arch Vis. Perhaps there is a way to make the Lands Design Realistic trees more photorealistic if a higher quality leaf map is used rather than a shader as you mentioned was currently being used.

Would you be able to tell me the answers to two questions:

1) Can the Lands Design realistic trees be used as blocks in order to keep the memory consumption down on the cards? I think this would be key.

2) Can the Lands Design realistic trees use Octane Materials? Or is it Rhino only materials? I think the ability to use Octane mats would be key for realism as well.

Thanks,
Ryan

[prehabitat]

......if a higher quality leaf map is used rather than a shader as you mentioned was currently being used.

So I dug a little deeper, and fired up the Lands Design (also FLamingo nXt) plant editor & the whole thing became clearer.(from within the leaves section of the plant editor you can click on the leaf and are prompted to open a different PNG map for it)

The leaf is RGB map driven, rather than a shader (just not the right one in the eucalyptus I was looking at). I have no idea if you can add super high quality png of the correct leaf and transform/redistribute it in the plant editor for a really realistic/accurate result? Will require more testing, but you can at least change the PNG over to something different.
I might do some tests to see if either the plant editor or the LandsDesign implementation is downscaling the PNG for the leaf in the viewport based on some parameter(s) I don't know of. OR (perfect world) perhaps it will not downsample at all & we can add higher quality leaves to each tree...

......
Would you be able to tell me the answers to two questions:
1) Can the Lands Design realistic trees be used as blocks in order to keep the memory consumption down on the cards? I think this would be key.

2) Can the Lands Design realistic trees use Octane Materials? Or is it Rhino only materials? I think the ability to use Octane mats would be key for realism as well.

1) Yes you can! 13mb with one tree, 13mb with all these trees!

Theres also some handy 'forest' tools in the plant placement button on the Lands panel:

the above shows the 'natural variation' in the forest placement: the above rectangle was made with 50% variation, and there is a noticeable difference between the instances... Pretty cool- this kind of thing is a royal pain in Revit.

2) not that I've found, picking the tree in the octane viewport gives a 'no octane materials found', you can then right-click the octane properties and convert the mats, but it doesn't seem to show up anywhere... I'm no Rhino/Octane expert though, so I might need to pass the Lands/Octane exploration baton over to someone more qualified at this stage.

[Bendbox]

Thank you VERY much for the informative and detailed answer Prehabitat! I really appreciate you taking the time for the great answers.

I'm going to do my best this week to download and try lands design and i'll report back. The fact that the trees can be used as blocks is pretty big, well, more of crucial for Octane, as you know.

Thanks again!
Ryan

[Bendbox]

Ok, been using Lands Design for a few now. It's capabilities are really pretty awesome -- however, there is one very big issue which, personally makes this plugin not useable for me.

The way that it generates forests with random variation (scale, rotation) doesn't seem to be using blocks/instances. Each scattered tree seems to be treated as a unique geometry. So, one tree renders as 24 megs, and a whole forest of the same tree, as 1624 megs. Not good. I've gone through every setting I can find, and can't seem to be able to make the forest creator use trees as blocks. Even when tagging a Rhino object as a tree, as you would a proxy, it doesn't render correctly. You can, however, import an individual tree, create a block, then array that block by HAND. But, that totally defeats the purpose of using a plugin like this.

I hope I'm wrong about this, someone more experienced with Lands Design please prove me wrong, because the plugin is really terrific. But the inability to scatter block instances with random size and rotation of the detailed NXt trees is a deal killer for me.

[Bendbox]

OK -- I've just proved myself wrong, and I'm glad. So, I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended, but I did figure out what was going on with the forest instancing, so disregard the above post.

So . . . IF you are within the Forest tab, and you create the Forest data with "group" checked, the generated forest WILL NOT be comprised of instanced blocks, but rather individual trees. The "group" function is checked by default, and is scattering the geometry but NOT instancing it and thus driving up the memory usage. However, if you uncheck "group", the scattered geometry WILL be instanced as block definitions, so rendering a 100 or 1 tree will be the same on memory.

And I'm really glad, because this is a very cool plugin.

Below are some REALLY quick images, please ignore the poor terrain and lighting, I spent no time on it. The ability within Rhino to scatter and adapt the scatter to the terrain, as well as switch and render between the conceptual, detailed, and realistic trees is simply awesome. This will be very helpful when working with a client -- the early planning stages can be shown, then as the project progresses switch to the better looking trees. See below . . . just a click of the button to switch between the different tree displays and render them.

Oh, and Octane materials can be used with no issues at all. The materials come in as native Rhino mats, so you just need to convert them to Octane ones and you can do anything you wish with the materials.

Concept Tree Display


Detailed Tree Display


Realistic Tree Display


Now, with all of this being said, the quality of the trees aren't bad. That is comparing them to Xgrog and CGAxis, where most of my tree library is from. I've got some trees in my own library that i just love -- they look terrific up close. So, I tested changing the tree file to link to an Xfrog tree and it worked perfectly! And, as expected, behaved like an instanced block, only 50 megs of RAM to render the entire the entire lot. So, below is an Xfrog tree. Just a click of the button to switch between all for renders in this post.



So, in short, so far, I'm really loving this plugin. I will continue to test and post anything relevant.