ArborShop tree modeller (coming soon)
HowieFarkes
Posts: 640
Over the years I've tried and used a lot of different packages for modelling trees. Starting with Carrara, X-Frog, and a number of plug-ins for Blender, but none quite gave me the results I needed. So... in the tradition of "Howie's products are built to scratch his own itches"*... introducing ArborShop - a simulation based system for generating realistic 3D tree models within DAZ Studio.
As a simulation based system the usual creation process gets turned on it head. Instead of deciding how tall the tree is, how many branches there are, how thick the branches are and how many child branches they have - it is all taken back to growth principles. How far does a branch grow in a cycle? How many buds sprout from that branch and what determines if they grow or die? How “bendy” and how attracted to the light are new shoots? When does a branch not produce enough “energy” to justify its continued growth.
Once a growth pattern is defined we “grow” the tree for a selected number of cycles (a cycle generally means a year - but some trees can have multiple cycles per year so let’s just call them cycles). Then the simulation starts - buds grow in length. If they collide they may die. If a bud is too shaded it will produce less energy for the tree and may be culled. A branch may bend down under gravity as it grows in length even while new shoots turn up towards the light. All these behaviours are modelled by ArborShop to produce some of the most varied and natural looking trees seen in DAZ Studio.
*and in the vein of "eating my own dogfood" my last 2 products UltraScenery2 - Maple Forest and Howie's Horticulture - Elm Trees were both produced using alpha versions of ArborShop
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Comments
And this is the same tree at different ages (5, 10, 15, 20, 30 & 40 cycles) that shows how the simulation grows the trees.
so, can one animate them growing?
Not directly through the plug-in (at this stage) - but you could place a tree, grow it, render it, add a cycle to its age, grow it, render it, repeat
This definately gets a thumbs up from me!
Cheers,
Alex.
How heavy is it to render? Can you have 10-20 trees within reason?
There are a lot of options for setting the quality of the tree's mesh - so they can be relatively light if you want to turn the mesh resolution down or extremely heavy if you want better accuracy. In the images above the trees range from 100K faces to 500K, but you can easily reduce that by a factor of 3 or more without too much hit to quality.
I love any tree that can reduce performance requirements while still looking good, especially one designed with this growth cycle in mind. I'm really looking forward to it!
Only trees or can/could it generalise to other plants?
The core basis of this plugin is the simulation of the growth and branching in woody stemmed plants - so for now it deals mainly with trees and shrubs
Thanks, I guessed that might be the case.
Could it respond to environment conditions (thinking right now of those trees which are pushed to one side by the effects of salt-laden sea winds, since there was a dramatic photo of the tree of the year earlier in the week).
that's free now from Bentley along with Vue, but they are heavy for D|S
this uses instancing
Oh wow, it's so amazing what you manage to get DS to do! Definitely interested. Please, if at all possible, could you make them react to a wind force? It's so often that images of landscapes seem beautiful but lifeless because nothing moves. It would be just fantastic if you could manage to change that for your tree system. Or even if they just had 'wind-swept' morphs included.
Will the leaves be the right size independent of the size of the tree? Ie, if you scale up the tree a little. Or will you have to regrow tree? And will Arborshop work in Daz4?
Not sure exactly what you're asking here so will just say - if you scale the tree via the properties tab then the leaves will scale along with it as they are part of the same mesh. You can also independently scale the trunk/branches or the leaves if you wish.
Most operations on the mesh and the foliage do not require re-growing the tree.
ArborShop will be DAZ Studio 6 only. I did start development of this plugin last year on DS4 but have since ported it to DS6 - I don't really want to maintain 2 different code-bases.
Eventually... I would like it make so the trees react to objects in the scene and even each other.
Actually ArborShop does not use instancing for the foliage (my older product UltraTrees does though). DAZ Studio does not allow recursive instancing so you can't instance trees that contain instanced leaves. So for this reason ArborShop uses simple planes and curved planes in the mesh for leaves - the trees can therefore be scattered/instanced using scatter tools.
Was thinking of adding instanced foliage as an option later on - folk could then use their UltraTrees foliage library as content for ArborShop.
ArborShop will include a "Tree Builder" system similar to UltraTrees to quickly put together trees if you're not inclined to dig into all the settings. So select a tree shape, select a bark material, and select a foliage preset and go for it.
ah, OK but to be fair, had no way of knowing until you shared
however instances themselves can be duplicated as a hierarchy too
(and the results can be collapsed - edit- group like instances)
and this is another possible way to create forests of trees made of instanced bits with the bits in a master out of view
I already do this building stuff out of parts
Thanks, something to look forward to.
This sounds wonderful! Will there be fir and/or spruce trees?
Yes there will.
Beautiful!!! YAY!!!!
bummer on DS6 only, but understandable.