Plant Factory

Hansmar

Another example. This one is made with only two main nodes: autogrowth and leaves. I did follow a tutorial, but forgot quite some of it, so played with it, not really knowing what I did. This autogrowth option has parameters that intend to mimic biological processes. By setting up these parameters you can modify the plant with age as well as by the random seed selector. These 6 variants are from random seeds of one and the same setup and a 15 year old plant and were created only by clicking the random seed generator multiple times,  Clearly, my variants were too wide to have such variation with one age! This scene is around 218 MB. The ground texture is from the Smoke and Mirrors set. The sky is from Horo with IBL.

I tried to add some Meerkats, but this only led to crashes, due to too high memory use.

mermaid010

Another cool example, beautiful results Hansmar

Horo

Very nice example Hansmar.

Hansmar

I tried to make the same tree twice, once with leaves consisting of meshes and once with planes with transparency for leaves. But I saw some potential improvements in between, so the comparison is not completely fair. However, the first scene, mesh-leaves, is almost 120 MB, while the second one is around 6 MB. The mesh-leave was selfmade in Hexagon, using to curves between a plane was made (see separate picture). Given the enormous difference in memory use, I guess I will not often use leaves consisting of meshes. 

I apologise for not using exactly the same tree and lighting settings. I would have made for a better comparison.

The last render is of the same tree, exported from Plant Factory at different ages. It is not easy to get the settings to make it more or less realistic. A real expert in the software would do much better. After creating the tree and the relation between age and parameters, you can choose an age and, voila!, a younger or older tree is created. These ones are the same tree, intended to be 2, 6, 9, 12, 16 and 20 years old.

1. mesh-leaves

2. plane/transparency leaves

3. tree in several years

4. leave-mesh

mermaid010

Once again very nice examples of trees Hansmar

NGartplay

Looks great Hansmar.  The plants look perfect on the terrain and water.

Horo

Great work on your experiments, Hansmar.

Hansmar

Thanks, Mermaid, NGartplay and Horo.

I realised that I made a mistake in the textures and that therefore the fake translucency effect was not really working. I redid textures now and made two close-ups of the two trees. In this case I did use a separate transparency channel. To use that for the leaves that are cut out of a plane, I took the leave picture, .e.g. a png, and made a black and white version with black around the leave and the leave itself I made very light grey. I tried to reverse the dark and light parts too, because at my picture the ribs (which are thicker and less transparent) were lighter in colour. Putting this light grey in black version of the leave in the transparency channel leads to the translucency effect.

First I will show the close-ups and then the full scenes again. I also added pictures of the texture settings.

  leaves cut from planes

  mesh-leaves

  tree with mesh-leaves

  tree with plane-leaves

 

Hansmar

Next one is a render with some variants of a simple tree with multiple instances. In the woods I put a number of lights. Apologies to those with dark screen settings; the darkness in this scene may be too dark for some, but it is intentional. I add a non-textured version of the tree too, that shows the meshes used as leaves.

mermaid010

Nice experiment and cool results Hansmar. The forest is nicely done, yes a bit on the dark side. Thanks for sharing the screenshots of the mat lab.

Horo

Hansmar - good work, well done examples.

NGartplay

Hansmar, you're really finding your way with this program.  Great work here.

Hansmar

Mermaid, Horo, NGartplay: Thanks.

Hansmar

Two more full scenes with PlantFactory trees/plants. The first one is a trunk I made following a tutorial by Geekatplay. I added a bird from the free bird set I used before as well as a free bull object. Furthermore some trees from the Vegetation set by David B and Horo and some other plants. The leaves in this one are so-called 'blades', which are meshes.

The second one uses various plants made with PlantFactory, either completely by me or by modifying some PlantCatalog plants. All have been saved at low resolution to allow quite some different plants / plant variants in the scene. Leaves in those ones are generally planes with leaves via transparency. I also instanced copiously and placed the instances manually, except for the bushes that were partly placed automatically via the instancing option.

mermaid010

Two very nice scenes Hansmar, you are making good progress with this program.

Horo

Hansmar - two very nicely done scenes, I like the second with the river most.

NGartplay

Impressive Hansmar.  Love the rushes along the river and the tufts of grass in the first.  Nicely done.

GeneralDee

Hi, I make trees for a game called Cities Skylines. I usually use Xfrog and finish the bulk of the work in Blender. I was interested in PlantFactory years ago but the pricing was a no go for me. Now I have it installed trying to learn the basics. I watched tutorial videos but most are outdated where the methods shown do not work. The reference manual is shallow without visual examples of the buttons mentioned. In short, I'm having a hard time getting to know some very basic parameters like, once you draw a cylinder, how do you taper it to look more like a tree? How do you see how many branches from the parent trunk? And most important for me, how to make custom billboards for leaves? Since I have to make trees low poly for a game engine (Unity) I make whole branch with leaves with alpha and map it to a billboard instead of making the leaves individual to save on poly count. Anyone know a good straightforward tutorial on what I just mentioned?

Bunyip02

Have not viewed them but there is a new release of tutorials for Plant Factory - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaH1PMiI_7AhRqzwscAZdxZHyAJpAvNEs

Check them out if you have not already done so.

Hansmar

GeneralDee, The new (free) version of PlantFactory indeed has a different look and feel than the version (2016) for which most tutorials can be found. However, Geekatplay has a whole host of tutorials, several for the 2024 version that walk you slowly through the basics and options. Most of these tutorials are just a few minutes and they can be found on YouTube. I did not yet see those mentioned by Bunyip02. There are other ones, but I cannot find a direct playlist now. I think he has decided to focus on the playlist Bunyip02 referred to. But, most things that work in older versions of PlantFactory still work in the new version too. But you do not start with 'trunk', 'branches' and 'leaves' as in the older version, but with more general elements that can be turned into these elements. Still, you can find already included trunks, branches and leaves with the software.

I very much recommend to follow the playlist referred to by Bunyip02 and to search on YouTube for other tutorials. There are also some from e-on software themselves. You will need some perseverance to get wonderful results, because the software has so many options that learning it cannot be done in a couple of hours.

Good luck and success!