Itoosoft presented Forest Pack 9, which includes long-awaited support for 3DS MAX 2025 and a new tool for creating foliage, ForestIvy. In this article, we’ll look at some of the new features coming with the release. Megarender will roll out support for Forest Pack 9 once we finish testing its stability.
ForestIvy
Forest Pack moves on from simply offering scattering tools and adds the ability to create your own plants from scratch. ForestIvy helps generate climbing foliage, such as ivy and vines, and includes 30 presets, created from scanned assets; custom presets can be saved to the library for later use in other projects. Both algorithmic and manual creation are possible, as is combining the two, and the generating is responsive and fast thanks to the full support of hyperthreading.
Familiar functions can be used to create plants in ForestIvy: layers of scattered items, culling (gravity and ground), use of Forest Color for pattern randomization, and much more. The sizes of leaves can vary depending on the age of the branch they are on. For Arnold and V-Ray CPU viewport and render time instancing are available, while support for Corona is currently in the works.
General Improvements
A change that every regular user of Forest Pack would notice first is the rearrangement of the main menu. The rollups order was changed to reduce the time spent scrolling between the most used parameter screens. The order is now as follows: Geometry, Distribution, Areas, Surfaces, Transform, Items Editor, Camera, Material, Effects, Animation, Shadows, Display, General, and About. Custom orders saved previously may need reconfiguring.
Point-cloud mode was updated to work better with modern hardware and the latest 3DS MAX versions. The density of points is now fixed, and the redraw occurs only when the item is modified, which drastically reduces the GPU load.
Smaller improvements include support for V-Ray proxy Edge Mode (‘Full Mesh’, works only in V-Ray 6 CPU), optimized use of memory when rendering animations, limiting it to 10 GB for all samples, performance increase for the Library Browser, better stability of interactive rendering in Corona, and much more.
See the full list of changes in Itoosoft’s changelog here. To find out the current Megarender-supported version of Forest Pack, contact us via chat. We are available 24/7 and always ready to help.
