XFrog- anyone use it before

[ace5600]

I saw this program and looks kinda cool, especially for landscapes and everything, but i want to know if this woks in conjunction with Maya.

Like do I build soomething in Maya export it to Xfrog add my grass, or whatever and import it back to Maya for rendering. Kinda like Realwave and RealFLow.

[lordiron2k]

Yeah I have the same idea.

[krunko]

In reply to:
Xfrog is an interesting application and there is a Maya plugin that lets you import directly from Xfrog. Dont expect a scene builder like Bryce or other programs of that type. It is very powerful for constructing trees, plants, flowers or for that matter almost anything "organic". And unlike PaintFX it is actual geometry, so you should be able to build onto models in Maya. It comes with a few dozen tree presets and a good set of tutorials. As far as I know, you are limited to Xfrog to Maya not Maya to Xfrog. You can down a evaluation copy at http://www.greenworks.de, they are in Germany.
Cheers,
chalkman

[oliv]

hi all,

I used xfrog and I didn't find it was that easy to create new trees and plants. In fact, the controls aren't all that intuitive.
I did take a look at natFX - a maya plugin that lets you send plants to maya. You can make it grow, change the season, tune the mesh to obtain a simple tree or a realistic one. After tuning it, you've got a tree with a complete skeleton (if you want it) that makes animating it really simple. You can pick up a demo from www.bionatics.com

Regards,

olivg

[krunko]

Thanks oliv,
I will check out NatFX.

Best,
chalkman

[blk]

x-frog makes some cool trees but its really weird to use and the plug in in maya doesnt like a big tree
I had a chance to play with this program and plug thanks to a friend and ill explain my experience

i had a tree with what turned out to be about 90,000 faces and im on a PIII 800 with 512 megs of ram and when i tried to import it with the xfrog plug in maya sat there churning for like 10 - 15 minutes and the task manager had the CPU at 100% and was saying maya wasnt responding i finally killed it and said screw it
seems it will import nice simple trees but naything really complicate forget it
ill have to give that other app a try

Bring it on

[krunko]

Yeah, had some problems with Xfrog myself. Just downloaded the other app. Let you know how it looks.

Cheers,
chalkman

[suonlim]

Xfrog generate very big file and you need to have a very powerful machine if you are going to use it with Maya. We just finished a project which is supposed to use Xfrog with Maya plug-in but has finally swithed over to Cinema 4D since it can handle such kind of big file easily.
The interface of Xfrog is kind of weird, so I don't think we will have the time to build the tree ourselve, infact you can buy their tree libraries which is only cost $99 US, from tropical to europe tree, imaging how much you can save if compared to buying each single tree from Viewpoint.

suonlim
www.wishingwellasia.com