[Q] what's better: Trees with geometry/opacity?

[optimaforever]

I asked that on the Thea forum as well but for skatter, what's the best type of trees?
opacity maps driven leaves or raw geometry leaves?

[jiminy-billy-bob]

For Skatter it really doesn't matter.
Skatter components will be rendered the same as regular components.

[optimaforever]

So all in all it's more a render engine issue...

[jiminy-billy-bob]

Absolutly

[Oboter]

By the way - what is a good resource for plants, trees an stuff? 3D Warehouse seems to have a lot of unpretty stuff, xfrog (though on sale right now) lets my wallet explode.

[Pixero]

I have made some trees and plants that are render ready for Thea.
You can find them in the Sketchucation store:
http://sketchucation.com/shop/models/landscape

[jiminy-billy-bob]

You can find cheap quality stuff, but not a lot.
If you want choice/variety and quality, you need to pay for it.

Xfrog, Vizpark, Evermotion, rendering.ru, CGAxis, MaxTree...

[valerostudio]

In VRay tests that I have done, geo-leaves render considerably faster than opacity leaves but they will not have the detailed edges that opacity leaves have, so I use them for far away views / background trees. Chaos added a feature under Diffuse called GI transparency cutoff to speed up rendering with these types of leaves. I have completely tested it to see how much time it saves. Can anyone elaborate?

[Pixero]

I don't know about Vray but in Thea you can set a clipping map to "hard" which renders faster than "soft". One thing to keep in mind is that increased tracing depth could make renders take more time.
When making this Pine tree viewtopic.php?f=372&t=63510
I found that the geometry version was a lot heavier but rendered much faster than a version with clip maps since the tracing depth needed to be very high.

[optimaforever]

So it depends on the tree type.
Pines and conifers in general are often hipoly, and with a reason.
In Vray/3dsmax they render faster with geometry, from my experience.
And opacity maps with vray was terrible. They recommended to use a hard bitmap blur threshold (that is perhaps close to the "hard" edge for the opacity map you're talking about in Thea, Pixero).
You could also reduce the GI subdiv multiplier for the vegetation.