I'd like to start including a variety of custom-made plants and trees in my stuff, without worrying about copyright.

Is Vue the best choice for this, or is there a cheaper, maybe more specialized, program?

Take a look at xfrog

An acorn?

 Thanks, I'll be here all week!

here we go Baum3D http://www.klausfilm.de/ now it's in german. come back here! thats easy to fix laddie. if you press F2 when started it will offer you the option of resetting to English.

now it outputs in VRML. not a problem, Meshlab http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ sort that out.

cost? Free.

Baum3D looks like a wonderful app.  Started it up, got an instant tree, started playing
around, got a custom tree in one minute.

THANKS for the tip!

Renders, please. :D

So I downloaded and opened it up too. Pretty cool.

But... no way to create conifers/evergreens? I didn't really see a lot of way to create genuine major varieties....

but wait, there's more!

there's also Frecle www.frecle.net/index.php now the main thing is, you can only really put out billboards with that. but, good for back ground work.

plus there's Arbaro arbaro.sourceforge.net/ and you could tweak the ol' Ivy Generator graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/ into making a tree.....

More goodies!  Thanks again!

Thanks, Kaibach! Call me stubborn, but I've been avoiding the billboard approach. But I'm definitely gonna take a look at those other apps.

Billboards work nicely in most cases, unless you want a realistic shadow.  
The ones sold here by GreenWorks are excellent......

Bryce will do trees (albeit with the 'bump in the trunk'...;) 5.5 can be found free on the Web. Can't export them, but it do make good backgrounds...

Could someone put up a image one one of the BAUM3D trees? I'd like to see what they look like.

Thanks

I like POVTree,,  (although the meshs can become very 'heavy' if you go for the full realism).  Open-source program, outputs to PovRay, which can be converted to .obj using Pose_Ray.  Let's see if my example image is still on my hard-drive.... [rummage, rummage....]   Mesh size depends on whether you want leaves, twigs, or root systems on it.  Comes with a wide variety of realistic presets, from conifers to [my favorite] a twisty, gnarly olive.

 

Quote - Bryce will do trees (albeit with the 'bump in the trunk'...;) 5.5 can be found free on the Web. Can't export them, but it do make good backgrounds...

The problem with Bryce (other than being unintuitive for the unitiated) is that it tends to take huge amounts of time to render. When I was reading the Bryce forums, I was shocked the first time I saw references to render times.

erm...yeah...;) Well, it's free...;)

That being said, SourceForge, Nonags, and a few other Open Source sites have tens of thousands of programs that do almost everything between them. Wouldn't be surprised if there's not a free tree-maker out there...

Yup.... but the problem with searching for such programs is that there are hundreds of
thousands of  "tree-maker" programs designed to make genealogical trees.  So it's
very hard to filter out the programs that make 3d trees!