Attached Link: TreeGenerator

Apparently you can export trees in a few different formats. There's a free version on the website as well as the pay one, and theres a couple of free trees to download as well. I haven't tried it and have no idea what complexity or size of tree it can do, but it looks interesting enough to give it a go.

Hmmm, maybe it's just me, but none of the free sample models (3ds format) seems to come in with textures, which Bryce of course asks for. After I substituted some bitmaps to get around that, I noticed the imported models were solid black. One of the models looked impressive in the website's thumbnail but proceeded to "explode" upon import. Must be those pesky 3ds "transforms" or somethin'. I hope the app gives better results than what I've seen so far. I'll have to try some of these out in Carrara to see if I have better luck there.

BTW, thanks for the heads-up on this. I'm a tree-freak. I constantly search the web for freeware tree/plant making apps and I've tried most of 'em (L-systems, POV, java-based, you name it) and I'll try and give this one a fair trial. I just thought I'd mention my experiences with this one so far.  It could well be that someone else has no probs whatsoever. You know how it is; your milage may vary. ;-)

I'm another who's always on the lookout for tree/plant generators as well.

Yeah, I'm a bit dubious as to how useful the free tree generator v1.2 is  - the trees I've got out seem to have missing poly's in the trunks.. so not sure if thats something I'm doing or its doing - I normally avoid dxf files. One of the free 3ds trees I tried had so many meshes in it that bryce couldn't list them all (it seemed to truncate the list) - each leaf had its own mesh name.

On the exploding 3ds - did we (someone) ever work out whats causing that (with the odd exploding 3ds and some obj files)??

Hi !

I'm the developper of TreeGenerator.. thanks for your interesting comments :)
For the number of meshes in the tree : in a standard 3ds file, the number of vertices in a mesh can't be over a 16 bit integer, which means that a mesh can't have more than 65536 vertices (and polygons too). That's why I have chosen to split the mesh for each leaves (which allows modelling the tree easier than if there were only one mesh too...) because a tree can have far more than 65k vertices.

I know I've seen high poly 3ds meshes, but I don't know yet how they managed to create them. Maybe in a next version I will let the choice to combine the tree in a single mesh if I manage to bypass the standard 16bits limit.
For the moment, you can still open your tree in a modeller and combine everything manually and export it again... it's not very practical, but it works ;)

For the missing polys in the v1.2, I don't perfectly remember the problem but I think it was that one polygon over two has its normal flipped... Try disabling the backface culling.

I hope this helps,
Don't hesitate to ask more questions ;)

Nicolas

I tried to open Sample2 to see if I could get the exploding tree thingy. About 49% into the load Bryce had a crash. Here's the message.

Bryce55.exe caused an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION i n module at 001B:006C1B6C

Number of Processors: 1
Processor Type: Intel Pentium Class
Windows OS: Windows XP
Version 5.0001
Build Number 2600
Service Pack 2

Memory Utilization:  99%
Total Physical Memory:  1046456 kB
Available Physical Memory: 3812 kB
Total Virtual Memory:  2097024 kB
Available Virtual Memory:  61376 kB
EAX=00000000  EBX=00000000  ECX=0012BAF4  EDX=00000000  ESI=0012BAF4
EDI=00000003  EBP=0082A244  ESP=5EC6E63C  EIP=00000001  FLG=00010202
CS=001B   DS=0023  SS=0023  ES=0023   FS=003B  GS=0000
EAX=00000000  EBX=00000000  ECX=0012BAF4  EDX=00000000  ESI=0012BAF4
EDI=00000003  EBP=0082A244  ESP=5EC6E63C  EIP=00000001  FLG=00010202
CS=001B   DS=0023  SS=0023  ES=0023   FS=003B  GS=0000

Everything else still works. I came back to Internet explorer to write this with Bryce still locked up.

The problem appears to be the 10890 mesh objects in the tree. In Rhino this object looks fine but the task of picking out and separating 10890 objects to texture green leaf or brown bark so I could use it in Bryce is daunting. I tried it anyway and missed a few leaves but the tree loaded in about 2 seconds.

This puppy is some kind of maple. Instead of a square with image and transparency applied every leaf is modeled. An option to group all these leaves into a single mesh or meshes in tree generator would probably take care of the crashes and do away with the exploding model. Texturing would also be helped if the trunk and leaves could be made separate objects or named when they were generated.

Bryce ignores normals and textures both sides so the holes are probably real holes left by backface culling.