Maybe some of you already know, but I thought I’d expose Arboro to the rest of you. It’s a Java L-System app that creates a great variety of trees, and exports them to povray/obj/dxf. I’ve taken it for a quick spin and it’ll serve well as a starting point for creating Unity2 tree assets.
Oh, btw - it’s free, and almost as good as the Tree Pro application I bought for USD 1600 about ten years ago (yep, 1600 bucks…).
Maybe there are other (even better) apps out there, cheap or free? Post 'em if you have 'em.
As for more advanced (and expensive) tree apps, there’s Xfrog for C4D (among others) and the previously mentioned Tree Pro (now Tree Garden or something) from Onyx Systems. Google is your friend.
We need to relaunch UniTree as a library of assets for the 2.0 terain engine that people can add too. What do you say boxy? Its been a long time since we dreamed up the UniTree concept and now we have it all in 2.0!! - Jeff
Ha, I was just thinking of contacting you about this! I think it would be great to make a few nature packs available, maybe we could group them according to environment eg Tropical Jungle, Northern Forests, Swampland etc, what do you think?. Anyway do you still have my email address?
Cheers
Boxy
Forgive my ignorance, but I downloaded the package and don’t see how to launch it. How do you do that in OSX?
I’m very excited to have a look, although the trees it generates also look pretty high poly.
It seems kind of primitive (GUI-wise) and some of the parameters don’t make much sense… I change them to reasonable-seeming values and the tree preview disappears.
It’s extremely tweakable, so it’s very easy to generate low-poly trees. Just make the leaves much fewer and larger and you can use them for leaf billboards as well.
Just wanted to post a follow-up and report that it’s very easy to create trees for Unity with Arbaro and C4D. I created a good looking tree by basically proceeding as follows:
Create a tree in Arbaro and make sure that you use very large (and fewer) leaves to serve as texture planes.
Save as obj and make sure that you tick the “generate UV” checkboxes.
In C4D , delete the stems object and make two selection sets, one for leaves, one for the trunk.
Connect the objects and toss the originals.
Create your textures and reposition UVs as needed.
Save in a “ambient-occlusion” folder and add it to the terrain engine.
Eat a cookie.
BTW, what makes the workflow extra nice is the fact that the UVs are already set, so creating variants of a tree is a 5-minute exercize since everything can be reused.
