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[lynn22]

Does anybody know of a realistic tree and plant generator with modeled leaves (not transmaps, because of the shadows).

I'm looking for a program not necessarily free but neither at $400 because in that case I know where to go

Many thanks for any suggestions.

[floyd86]

I have two programs i often use for making plants. I don't really have a good one for trees, i model those myself.

But for plants:
plantstudio --> for plants. (attachement 1, in the back)
ivy generator --> for ivy

Ivy generator works with transmaps, but for every single leaves so it still gives a good effect (attachment 2)

[lynn22]

Thank you floyd, I have both these programs as well and they are good (the climber in my siesta picture is made with Ivy Generator).

Plantstudio is good too ... if you don't look too closely   so to improve plants and get good trees I've been searching for two days now and I'm running out of options. So any suggestions are most welcome.

Lovely pictures you are showing here.

[headwax]

If you can pick up Carrara 5 - probably free if you search ?? - it has an amazing plant tree generator that you can make plants with and I am led to belivee export as an obj and import into anim8or

as far as where to pick it up? Kreator might know

[RnDr FOX]

headwax when I made a tree in carrara and exported it to anim8or it didn't work. Have you gotten that problem? Also yes carrara has a good tree generator but I figure that they are VERY high poly.

[headwax]

Hi RnDrFox

Not yet Carrara works with surface replicators, so one instance of a leaf will make hundreds of apparent instances. But when you export they become real meshes - so you are right = high polly .

But a tree is always going to be high poly unless you use surface replicator or transmaps ...

http://www.shapemagic.com/products.htm

looks interestsing.

MP3d has a good simple tut on transmaps usage for trees too

EDIT: Brief play with carrara exports a tree obj 250 mb . Pretty sure you could get this down slightly to 100 mb hehe off to the funny farm.....

[RnDr FOX]

Ohh...hmmm I am going to look into how people in the professional industry make realistic trees as low poly as the quality will allow. (Now I pretty sure people like Pixar have extremely high poly trees because they are only rendering it all once, but gaming companies, I'll have to check it out.)   OFF TO GOOGLE

When I find an answer I'll post it.

[hihosilver]

Gaming companies do use transparency maps, the difference is, their engines can often cast shadows from the transparency  maps, while anim8or simply doesn't yet have the capability to.

[headwax]

you could always fake shadows by "baking" on the  shadows on the eg landscape map.

okay unless the trees are swaying in the breeze

[lynn22]

I found a tree program at an affordable price and tested the demo which limits a tree to 4 branches + 3 x 4 sub-branches.
I also made a similar tree in TreeMaker (http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=1395.0 - Reply #4 by NickE) to compare apples with apples and though the result is not meant to be a beauty contest the difference is significant.

The Generator program lets you draw your own leaves from a photo with as many or as few points as you like, keeping the polies low, and also uses the same photo as texture for the leaves. So you can have a copper beach and a silver birch next to each other and actually see the difference.

Also the difference in size of each file is big, 49%. With the test trees I can place 3 Generator trees for 2 TreeMaker trees and have the same file size which is also important.

Despite all your help and extensive searching this is the best I could find though I'm still on the look-out for something to make regular plants.

[lizeal93]

if you want a really good program get bryce version 5 is free.

it has a full tree generator and many textures. they can all be exproted to 3ds or obj your pick

[mak]

i dont think plant studio works with vista, dose it?

[lynn22]

lizeal93 I looked into this and there seems to be a problem with the activation code from what I read on CNet.  Thanks for the tip though.
Do you know if there is a version available to buy on CD somewhere, again it seems from the Daz site that it's download only and at 125 Mb it would take me a day

mak I wouldn't know, I run XP Pro.

[RnDr FOX]

I cannot get plant studios to work with vista, but it works with other windows os

[kreator]

Carrara 5 Pro Tree Render just for info....