randym77 opened this issue on Feb 27, 2013 · 64 posts
czarnyrobert posted Fri, 09 August 2013 at 3:07 PM
aeilkema - the complexity (and detail) of plants made in TPF depends anly on your determination and what your computer can handle.
I think that all best images have been already posted on the plant factory website.
In TPF content you will mainly find low poly models I was asked to create for Lumen RT.
You should also notice that when using models in ecosystems, they get highly decimated (there is a setting in plant root to turn it off). So I saw some pretty lousy images of big acacia tree - it looked ugly just because of high decimation.
TPF has some automated decimation, so models at distance are generated with fewer polygons, however in mine opinion you one should use different kind of models for background, mid, and closeups. It would be completely impractical to put huge, complex models into ecosystem to create distant forst - for distant forest old Vue plum tree does great job.
TPF is very differnt from old "Botanica" system. In old system plants have been created in windows notepad :-) Really ! It was a simple L-system, and code could be typed in any text editor. Geometry was limeited to cylinders, paraboloids and spheres. Now you can do much more in TPF, however L-systems had also some recursive functionality which is missing in TPF. Neverthless TPF can do much more than old Botanica, and much easier. Coding plants in L-System was like MATRIX :-)