ZGameEditor forum

Here is a very nice free app to generate trees and plants,. I have not found any way to import the full resulting files into ZGE, however I am not up on 3d format conversions,. if anyone finds a way using free apps,. (blender, etc.) do please let me know! I can get the mesh in,. but without the texture data (for the fronds, and barks) it is largely useless. Well can likely find some uses


http://www.artifactgames.de/Kraut/

"Kraut is a program to procedurally generate plants, especially trees. Through a set of parameters you specify how a tree is supposed to grow. Various different, but similar trees can be generated from the same specification. Additionally there is a manual editing mode, which allows to easily paint branches by hand, such that very unique trees can be created.

BETA 1 Features

Procedural growth of branches and fronds.
Easily create thousands of variations from the same tree specification.
Interactive WYSIWYG editor.
Undo / Redo system.
Export Meshes to OBJ format.
Export Meshes to FBX format.
"Leafcard" mode to easily create textures which can be used to represent entire branches. This enables you to create highly detailed looking trees without many polygons.
Exported leafcard textures are automatically processed to be well suited for mipmap creation.
Automatic computation of up to five level-of-detail meshes with much reduced polygon counts.
Many tweakable options to get the best quality out of level-of-detail meshes.
Manual editing mode that allows to easily paint unique branches exactly as desired.
On manually created branches additional procedural branches may be grown.
"Physical Simulation" mode: Branches will try to grow around obstacles, such as other branches or additional objects that can be loaded from OBJ files. This allows to create a tree that shall fit perfectly into some corner of a game level.
Several sample trees and sample leafcards included."

Were you having trouble with the texture coordinates, or getting the DDS textures converted? In any case, it worked fine for me .. but I can't see how these kind of trees would be useful for ZGE ( as there's no sub-mesh polygon sorting ).

K

Ah yes, I see the issue you are referring to now. I found that I could export just the trunks, and just the fronds,. and then import them with the single mesh option,. and although this seems more workable in ZGE (gets rid of all the single meshes and color sets) the texture coordinents seem still to be off,. and this depth-sorting issue becomes quite apparent.

Oh well, perhaps this tree editor is more useful with UDK, Cryo, or V engine, where LOD are ready to go, that is what it was designed for anyway. Still a fun tree building tool,. and I learned some mesh design ideas, I can use in ZGE as well

PS: DDS textures convert with the GIMP you just need the DDS plugin.

Hi guys

I'm the author of that tool and just stumbled across your discussion.
I'm happy you like the tool

There are several major problems with the export options in Beta 1:
* The OBJ format is just not good enough for more complex meshes
* The FBX file format is better, but also lacks some important features. For example, since trees are organic, simple UV texture coordinates are not sufficient, one really needs a Q component by which UV gets divided in the shader (too solve this problem http://home.xyzw.us/~cass/qcoord/)
* FBX does not support billboards
* FBX is a pain to work with
* I don't know of any better file format, and especially no more widely used one

So for Beta 2 I set out to solve this issue by simply exporting (additionally) to my own format, which supports embedding all LOD levels in one file, all per-vertex data that is needed, all general settings (like at which distance to pick which LOD), etc.

The file format will be open and I will ship Beta 2 with an open source sample application that reads and renders a tree. So if you are interested it should be a lot easier to write an importer for that format and get EVERYTHING to work right, then by trying to squeeze this information through FBX somehow.

Apart from that there have been A LOT of improvements. For example you can now automatically generate impostors, convert all textures to DDS, etc.
I hope to be able to release Beta 2 within the next week or so, but I still have to finish some stuff before that.

If you have any feedback or feature requests, don't hesitate to contact me. I can't promise anything, but I'm always open to suggestions.

Bye,
Jan.

Beta 2 is now available:
http://artifactgames.de/Kraut

Have fun,
Jan.