[World Editor] Plant Life and other TGC Tools

I like Treemagik and will probably buy a copy of the full version. The $20 price is certainly nice.

I noticed that The Game Creators has a $50 bundle that includes other tools that look like they may be useful. In particular, Plant Life looks like it'll be a good complement to Treemagik. Has anyone used it with a MV workflow or know more about its general level of usefulness?

The bundle includes other things designed specifically for a DarkBASIC toolchain and I wonder if their output/formats would be useful in an MV toolchain:
DarkVOICES
DarkMATTER
Dark Shader
Cartography Shop

I'm not sure. I bought TreeMagik and am happy with it. I have made some terrific looking trees, it is robust and lets you create your own bark and leaf textures or import new ones. The trunks and branches are highly configurable and all this is in a very easy to use package.

I have run across some anomalies, while importing TreeMagik. It doesn't surprise me, as we're dealing with importing and exporting to different formats. I import my TreeMagik into DeleD, which lets me retain bark and leaf texutures and then export to MV.

Another anomaly is how the trees actually display when placed in the world editor. I was fooling-around with making forests and notices some of the trees inherited a weird transparency. When looking at some trees, while trees are in the background, it seems to replace any area of the foreground-tree with the graphics of the background tree. I'm hoping this is just a visual anomaly in the world editor and that it doesn't show when testing on the world server.

I haven't tested any of the other dark software you mention, or the cartography shop.

I've gone out on a limb and ordered the pack. I'll report back with my results once it's arrived and I've had a chance to play with it a bit.

Try tree[d] also
http://www.frecle.net/index.php?show=treed.about

It's free from the creator of lightmapper Giles and can create nice low poly trees.

Takes a bit of trial and error but I have used it along with Ultimate Unwrap3D to export to Ogre.

jstrat74 wrote:

Another anomaly is how the trees actually display when placed in the world editor. I was fooling-around with making forests and notices some of the trees inherited a weird transparency. When looking at some trees, while trees are in the background, it seems to replace any area of the foreground-tree with the graphics of the background tree. I'm hoping this is just a visual anomaly in the world editor and that it doesn't show when testing on the world server.

I haven't tested any of the other dark software you mention, or the cartography shop.

I have seen this 'effect' in other engines, I believe it has to with alpha sorting and subsequently, fighting. Are the textures TGA or maybe PNG? Changing them to JPG (assuming you don't need a alpha channel) may resolve that issue.

Cartography shop is part of the Truespace suite. Personally, I dislike its handling of any content, and wouldn't suggest to anyone, to use it as part of a workflow, unless you have plenty of time spare.

The effect you are seeing dows have to do with alpha sorting. You might be able to fix it by adding

Code:

scene_blend add
            depth_write off

to your .material file for those textures that might work.

Most likely you will need the alpha channel for the transparent parts of the leaves. Otherwise there will be black around the leaves.

Now I remember with Ogre 1.7 and tree[d] trees I had to mod the materials files to get the alpha working for the leaves.

Code:

// Creator: Ultimate Unwrap3D v2.50.07
// Time: Mon Nov 21 14:16:07 2011

material rotted_jpg
{
  technique
  {
      pass
      {
        ambient 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
        diffuse 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
        specular 0.500000 0.500000 0.500000 1.000000 1.000000
        emissive 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000

        texture_unit
        {
            texture rotted.jpg
        }
      }
  }
}
material NoNameMat1
{
  technique
  {
      pass
      {
   
   //added for trans leaves
        lighting off


        ambient 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
        diffuse 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
        specular 0.500000 0.500000 0.500000 1.000000 1.000000
        emissive 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000

   //added following 2 lines for trans leaves
        scene_blend alpha_blend
        depth_write off

   
        texture_unit
        {
            texture leaf5.png
       
         //added following 2 lines for trans leaves
            tex_coord_set 0
            colour_op modulate 
        }
   }


  }
}

I am a confirmed software tool junkie. Would love nothing more than to acquire another
(possibly redundant) asset creation tool

In the past the licenses with some of the Dark Basic tools
sometimes seemed unclear. Shareware, under a certain price point
or you have to buy a commercial license... not sure.

Is the license issue pretty clear with the Treemagik and Plantlife
tools?



/thanks

I found This Website sometime ago, which gives free plants. There is a wide variety there, with some great textures, which you can use over and over again, if you say make your own plants.
The polycounts vary depending on which plant you choose, no reason not to reduce the polycount in something like MeshLab which has some great optimisation tools.