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What's New in Forest Pack 5

This version introduces several new features and improvements over previous versions. Below, we outline the key updates and changes, including compatibility notes and fixes for known issues.

V-Ray 3.3 Support​

The latest version of Forest Pro now offers support for V-Ray 3.3. This enables rendering performance improvements from V-Ray 3.2 onwards. In tests, we found speed gains ranging between 40% and 100%, depending on the scene composition. Please note that V-Ray 1.5 and 3.0 are no longer supported. The supported V-Ray versions now include 2.x, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.

Toolbar with Shortcuts​

A new toolbar has been added, providing shortcuts to frequently used features such as adding a Forest Pack object, Forest Level of Detail (LOD), Forest Tools, and Forest Lister.

Forest Lister​

Managing multiple Forest Pack objects in your scenes is now easier with Forest Lister. This new tool has a streamlined interface for enabling, disabling, renaming, hiding, unhiding, and selecting Forest Pack objects. It also allows for faster editing and provides additional information about each object. For a comprehensive guide on how to use Forest Lister, please refer to the accompanying documentation.

Forest Effects​

We introduce Forest Effects, a feature that allows you to extend the capabilities of Forest Pack. It enables limitless animation options, random transformations, colouring and more. Built like a scripting engine, it uses mathematical expressions to manipulate Forest items. You can load effects from a library or import them from individual files. Furthermore, you can export parameters and references to make it easier for end users to interact with your creations.

Additional Renderer Support and Settings​

  • Edge Mode has been added for Mental Ray and Corona renderer. It requires the use of a new procedural texture map called "Forest Edge" in the opacity slot of all materials used by the Forest object.
  • There are also updates to Distribution and Diversity Maps. These now recognise multiple models with the same colour ID and handle them as a group with their own probability values.

New Presets​

New presets for mulch and rugs have been added for more diversity in your projects.

Other Changes​

  • Nested Forest objects can now be used in library presets, subject to some limitations.
  • A new "Render quality" option has been added, currently available only for V-Ray materials.
  • Several improvements have been made in terms of memory usage, material optimisation and support for additional versions of Max.

Fixes​

Numerous bugs have been addressed in Forest Pro 5.0. These include fixes for the 'Zoom extent' behaviour, various issues with Mental Ray, crashes related to VRayClipper, and viewport performance improvements.

Compatibility Notes​

Max versions 9 to 2009 are no longer supported; the minimum version supported is now Max 2010.