Need advice about getting realistic plant models

[JacksonLamme]

Hi,  I want to purchase some plant packs which will be compatible with Maya.  On Turbosquid they have lots of plant packs which are for 3ds Max, but come with .obj and .fbx formats which say they don't come with materials but with mapping and textures included.  Will it be difficult to get these to perform in my scene?  Do you have any suggestions as to where I could find good models, and/or what file formats?  Also, has anyone had a good experience with Laubwerk packs? 

[hamsterHamster · Accepted solution]

The main question here is: which render engine? It's less likely to render anything realistic with Maya Software render which shaders there will be in FBX, so I assume you're going to use at least Arnold, if not anything else, like Redshift, PRman or Vray. In any case, you will have to know/learn its shader architecture, lighting and rendering techniques. And there you want as many as possible attribute maps. Make sure those plants come with effective Diffuse(Albedo/BaseColor), Specularity/Roughness, Normal, Translucency(Thickness) and AmbientOcclusion maps - that would be bare minimum for the realism.

Can't comment on Laubwerk.

[Baboonian · Accepted solution]

you can use max2maya. This plug-in supports the most popular rendering engines

[JacksonLamme]

I'm going to be using Arnold

[hamsterHamster]

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Standard+Surface#StandardSurface-MaterialPresets

Also, check out which of presets can be a good base for tweaking to achieve the degree of realism you are after.