Goodbye Poly Counts: Why you should use Forest Pack and Railclone
Cadiz, on the southern coast of Spain, is redolent with history. It’s not somewhere you’d expect to find the headquarters of a company on the cutting edge of instancing and scene assembly tools in 3ds Max, but that’s where itoo Software began and have grown for almost 20 years.
itoo Software have one stated goal – to make life easier for artists. Their procedural tools are designed to remove limitations. Too many polygons? No problem! Complex procedural model to create? Railclone removes the technical barriers associated with parametric workflows.
Forest Pack and Railclone play an essential part in the pipelines of major studios including ILM, LUXX, Scanlinevfx, Blur and more. These studios come for the instancing power but quickly realise the benefits of an advanced feature set that’s perfect for scene assembly.
According to Sergej Eichmann, CG supervisor at Blur Studio, “Forest Pack is the ultimate set-dressing solution. Whether you need quick generic setups or complex show-specific creations – Forest Pack has reliable, easy-to-use tools that can handle anything.”
Don’t be fooled by the name either, Forest Pack has many more uses than scattering trees. Christian Haas from Stuttgart-based LUXX Studios describes Forest Pack and Railclone as their “secret weapon.” LUXX used Forest Pack to scatter and animate Kinect motioncaptured people to generate huge crowds of up to 500,000 individuals. “Forest Pack enabled us to handle characters, including endless variations in geometry, animation and colours, but also easily control the crowd’s action.”
LUXX’S latest film, Manou the Swift, required a 10km x 10km model of the French city of Nice, which required only 60GB of RAM to render in about 30 minutes per frame. According to Christian, “This is possible due to Forest Pack: we could fly along the cityscape without needing to rework the scene.”
But don’t take their word for it, try it yourself by taking the free Lite version for a spin, or read more on itoo Software’s website: itoosoft.com.