Has anybody made a plant in the plant factory and then imported it into Carrara?

It looks like you can export a plant using a format that would be importable into Carrara but I don't know if all the textures come with it.

Im thinking of getting the plant factory but it would make no sense if it's not functional with C.

Looks interesting.  THere is a try version that still exports so you could try it.  Thanks for the info on it too

You can't save with the trial.

• Saving is disabled,
• Renders carry a logo,
• Render stills up to 1920x1080 and animations up to 1280x720,
• 1 polygon out of 5 is removed from exported geometry (export feature available in Studio and Designer only),
• The trial version ships with a limited content selection.

Wern't you trying to see if you could export with the textures as a test.  Thats all I was referring too.

Export 3D vegetation to another application as standard .OBJ, .3DS or animated .FBX (which the little * was saying it drops some of the mesh out, but I was thinking you could still test if it did what you wanted, was all I was meaning).

I hope someone knows the answer for you!

Take care

I haven't had the chance to try the demo but I will this week.  At the conclusoon of the tests, I will post here what I learn.

Ok. Downloaded, installed, run. exports .obj fine; except the missing polies. Be sure to export imbeded alpha, uses normal not bump maps. Shader zones are named for the texture so it is easy to set up the shaders; no textures are on the .obj when opened.

The sunflower looks like it needs some 7dust lol

Thank you for teh trial report! Question: How heavily does it rely on alpha maps?

Judging by the missing polys in your image, the obj is pretty polygon-heavy, so what would it need the apha maps for in this case?

Actually the flower is just 18meg, not that big. But the leaves and such are just lowish{LOL} poly flats, so they need the alpha.

Thank you!

That explains it, although, to me, it significantly devalues the entire thing. I'd love to be able to produce plants which are filly geometry based (especially since these seem to have enough polygons to actually make the polygons which get alpha'ed-out completely unnecessary... and it's all triangles anyway, so you get a lot of fidelity from the geometry alone...) There is no setting in the program to force the alpha maps into geometry?

Replicated geometry-only objects render much faster than alpha-mapped stuff, so for me having a program to generate diverse plants with geometry-only shaping would have been worth the pricetag for big projects. Without it - not so much :(...

Also, given that CG Artists version is limited to 100000 poly export, not being able to clean up unnecessary geometry seems especially unfortunate...

And, Stanley, thank you so much for testing it out and sharing your findings!

Actually that is the sort of stuff I love to do. If you look on the DAZ forum I was one of the ones doing all the expermanting/testing of the C8.5 beta. If DAZ hadn't decided to try to mine gold from carraraests over a .5 update, I'd still be doing that. As it stands, till I opened carrara to check the plany factory export, I hadn't opened carrara in months.

I also thank you for the testing.  My results at the moment are essentially the same.  Still, I believe this product can produce excellent plant models.

Quote - I also thank you for the testing.  My results at the moment are essentially the same.  Still, I believe this product can produce excellent plant models.

So there really is NO way to clean up unnecessary polys?

Thank you for checking it out and sharing the results!

In general, I think the results are pretty cool.  I'm going to test out a few more of the plants.  If the trees look good, I'll probably get the package as it is cheaper than the entire Xfrog library and is more versatile.

Still, an impressive result.

Attached Link: Forest Wonders example

Actually, given this information, I would probably go with the free Ivy Generator + Carrara's own plant editor instead.

I've had pretty good results before when I used the plant generator to create leaves and branches and then surface multiplied those onto a modeled trunk or onto Ivy Generator-produced geometry. You can get very good diversity this way, and the bonus is that you are not paying the price in render time for the alpha maps, nor are you limited in how the resulted conglomerate is rotated, allowing for easy randomized replication for a complex landscape. 

I've used this method in the attached image (see link), and replaced the transmapped branches/leaves with Carrara-plant-editor generated ones. (I left a few behind: some Ivy and grass that came with the Stonemason's set are still there and transmapped, but there are only a few of them left, and if I had to push the image further, I'd replace them too)

After a little more experimentation and some internal debate,  I decided to go with Antarans suggestion.  My primary problem has been that Carrara doesn't develop very good trunks for certain kinds of trees and C can't do what I've read about classified as "hero" trees.

Even simple branch distributions for pine trees don't really work out very well in the plant editor.

So, I figured building my trees using Antarans suggestion is a really good thing to try.

I am on a business trip but when I get back, I will let you know How it goes.