Question: Plant-models xfrog 3.5 -> update xfrog 4.x

[richards]

Hi Xfrogger,


is there any plan to upgrade the plants collection to the newer xforg 4.x version or xfrog 5.0?

Thanks!

[Stewart]

We built XfrogPlants ASIA with Xfrog 5 for Maya. This means if you own Maya you can edit and animate branching, apply physics simulations like wind, etc.
There is a big horror film coming out that has a big Xfrog for MAYA "Very Scary Tree" as it's main character. We will supply more news on that as it gets closer to release.

In any case to answer more clearly - we like modeling with 3.5 for libraries as it is very robust and efficient, there is no overhead of c4d or maya in the modeling process, and therefor we are free to simply use the procedural components of 3.5 without any slowdown. and the results work everywhere and are editable by anyone with Xfrog 3.5. As for Xfrog CINEMA4D and Xfrog Maya, we will produce more plants created with both. As it adds a lot of power if you own C4D or MAYA, if the plant is already setup as a hierarchy inside and you can animate it very easily, as well as edit branching and all the rest. As for editing all existing plants to work inside C4D and MAYA - they already import as mesh or hierarchy(not always perfectly but they will come in and you can usually tweak them to get what you want)

I hope this helps answer your question

-stewart mcsherry
product manager
xfrog inc

[richards]

Yes, thank you!

I work with cinema 4d and would like to have the xfr objects in their hierarchy directly in c4d without the tweaking process xfrog3.5 -> xfrog4.x. There is quite a lot of optimization potential and you have to be very familiar with xfrog to convert the 3.5 settings into an efficient 4.x hierarchy, as shown in the 2 videos here. Especially you have to understand all the 3.5 features and get used to that modelling process to really understand all tricks used in 3.5 and how the import-options generate the according 4.x hierarchy of that.

Is the structure and hierarchy very different in xfrog for maya or is it quite straight forward to cinema 4d?

Thank you!
>

[Walli]

this is no official answer, thats something Stewart has to answer - but in general it is best, at least in most case, to freshly model plants in Xfrog4. There simply have been so many improvements and also in Xfrog 3.5 many modeling tricks have been used and either it is hardly possible to carry them over, or it simply makes no sense to carry them over, because in Xfrog 4 you don´t need those tricks anymore.

The structure in Maya is very similar, as it is always the same idea (and to a certain degree also code) behind the different plugins. But both in Cinema and Maya you simply save the Xfrog hierarchy as scenefile (*mb for maya, *c4d as Cinema4D user). So it is not possible to transfer a Maya hierarchy to Cinema and vica versa. Also the handling is different, as Cinema plugin tries to mimic typical Cinema4D workflow and the Maya plugin tries to act like other Maya tools.

[Stewart]

Walli's answer is accurate. It really depends what purpose you need the hierarchy. If you are doing a commercial film that needs a tree growing from scratch, then you would study the growth animation shown in the tutorials section and use that as a basis to build your own . The existing libraries that are pretty much all 3.5, are best edited in 3.5, e.g. that would mean to change branching, gravitropism, trunk lengths, etc, to create more variations. If you just need wind effects, we see users applying dynamics to hierarchy models all the time now. It really is a question of what you want to do with the hierarchy, what needs that you have, decide what software to use. It is also possible to open a model in 3.5, study it, pull it apart, and then rebuild side-by-side in xfrog for maya or xfrog for cinema4D- normally i would say import hierarchy and tweak, but its also possible to study the hierarchy in detail in 3.5, then reproduce it in maya or c4d - but again, depends what you are really needing to do with the hierarchy. in any case i hope you have seen Walli's new video, Building and Animating a Rose using Xfrog Cinema4D. http://vimeo.com/39361651

[richards]

Great Tutorial - thanks for the hints!

You really need to get used of the hierarchy work and find all the right places to adjust the parameters - Walli is a Champion in xfrog

At the moment I'm not going for animations, just want to create my own plant models.
But it would be nice to use existing plants from the collections as reference and starting point.

So you think its better to remodel plants in xfrog4.x newly than to convert them from 3.5 ?

So we come back to my initial question if there are any plans to remodel the whole collection for the newest xfrog version?

[Walli]

well, of course you can still take a look and use this as starting point or as reference, no problem with that. And some models come in very nice and just a few adjustments have to be done. So its salways a good idea to see how good the import works.
You just have to be careful not to rebuild unneeded stuff. For example in Xfrog 3.5 we sometimes had to use two hierarchies for one plant. Hierarchy one made the "main plant", a partly invisible second hierarchy added secondary stuff.
This is usually not necessary anymore.
Also scaling and transformations often are recreated by putting objects into Null objects, which is not needed.

About plans you have to ask officials

[Monadnoc]

I also would love to see more models in native Xfrog C4D format. I do appreciate all the free models, and I use them for reference all the time. But they are really only good to study the hierarchies and what Xfrog components were used, etc. All in all, I find them extremely confusing to follow in terms of organization. You have to be a pro in Xfrog 3.5 to really get a lot out of them, as your post above illustrates. But the biggest drawback for me is there are no Functions that are useable in Xfrog 5. They all use rnd instead of noise. And since I find that the key to getting a nice looking plant in Xfrog 5 is using Functions, it would be very nice to have some models in native C4D and Maya format that use them. Also, all the control curves are usually made up of a gazillion points.

I'm not being critical, just pointing out why some of us want models in native C4D formats to learn from.

A perfect example is the new Rose tutorial. It helped me immensely with a Daylily I am modeling where I needed the base of the petals/sepals to stay tight but the ends of them to spread out randomly. The noise function for the rose calyx should work perfectly (although I haven't tried it yet). A great tutorial. Thanks Walli and Stewart.


Monadnoc