Fractal Tree Maker for SketchUp - Free add-on

Al Hart

Al, thanks for the fantastic plug-in; you've solved the problem of cloned tree/shrub components.

While playing around with it, I noticed it makes the insertion point at the center of the component. This means if you have a lopsided or leaning tree, it's not at the trunk; when orbiting the model, the trunk's location will change. Any chance the program can be modified so that the insertion point is always on the base of the trunk?

We're going to do two things.

Clip the roots at the ground - right now we make an image which includes roots below the ground. That is useful sometimes, but much too confusing.
Create the image (and component) so that the center of the bottom of the trunk is at the center of the image (and component)

Stu

@mirjman said:

I might be missing something here, but is there a slider to adjust the taper for the actual trunk object? I am thinking of the giant redwoods or ponderosas out in California- they are hundreds of feet tall and don't have the cute "flare" at the base of the trunk that I can't seem to get rid of.

Go to 'Trunk'...and use the 'spread' slider

A 3D version sounds attractive but if you look at the way this app can produce leaves [or in 3D, polygons] I would guess that you could come up with 50 and 60 Mb trees [if you could get that far without SU crashing ]

david_h

Okay. . .So I am playing with this, and Have created a Dang Ugly tree if I say so myself. When I did Render 1, I didn't see it at all, but then exploded it and it showed up--But as you can see--rectangular shadows.

Any quick tuts on a remedy? I have read thru most of this stuff, and I am a bit confused. (Nothing new there, hehe, but still . . .) RPTRee Test Image.jpg

Stu

Dave...youve got me confused now.....how did you explode the tree without seeing it?
But anyway, there is no point in exploding the tree unless you are using it in a renderer like Podium [in which case the square shadow turns into a realistic shadow after rendering]
At the moment, the trees dont cast shadows in SU....unless exploded....and by doing that you also loose the 'face me' capability.

Oh, and Id loose the roots....looks a bit like one of those plastic Xmas trees

mirjman

the spread control still results in a trunk that smoothly tapers from the base, which is fairly unrealistic for trees like pines which begin to taper farther up from the ground.

I am also experiencing some double grouping with the created components where they have a group inside the component- not sure if this is desirable behavior

Also thought I should mention here, this plugin works hand in hand with "component spray" ruby to create fast environments: rendered in podium

Stu

Mirjman, that sprayed image looks great!

I dont know a lot about DCs but given that its really easy to produce leaf variations on one tree....would it be possible to make a DC that could display the whole range of seasons?

Summer.Autumn.jpg

Alan Fraser

Yes Stu, You can also have different growth stages too. You can do this by having any number of variants occupying the same space and use the DC attributes to specify which one is visible. The file itself would be quite large, but the performance would only be the same as if the visible form was the sole element. I haven't tested how multi-part DCs export to Kerky etc. but when exported to another format, only the visible element gets exported.

Chris Fullmer

Yeah Stu, that would be pretty easy. You could create all 4 seasons and then combine them in a DC. Then you could have a pull down option as to what season to display. You could also creat a series of heights for each season, then make a menu that would let you choose what age to show during what season. All of this is also do-able by some tricky layer management too though if you don't want to dig into DC's

Chris

Alan beat me to it

Al Hart

(We were just talking about what to do about seasons about an hour ago)

Although we are all looking for a good use for Dynamic Components, the layer idea might be better.

You could have just 4 layers, the same in each component, and then change the season for all plants at the same time.

Also, we could make a generator which allows you to specify bark and leaf images for each season and make all 4 seasons at the same time, and create the component with all 4 seasons in one step.

And, of course, we could do the same with age - generating images for 2, 5, 1- and 15 years for each plant.

Chris Fullmer

I think I agree that seasons through layer management might make more sense here because it would be a universal change. DC asettings are per DC. So each tree would need to be changed separately. Or they would need to ALL be in one container component that could then pass on the season information to each tree in the model. But I think the layers might work better. Although the layers could get bulky if you start specifying 4 tree ages and 4 seasons. That's 16 layers. But I guess its not that bad for the great functionality it would provide.

Chris

EarthMover

This is exciting! The idea of changing seasons is great. What if there were some magical way to tie a dynamic component into sketchup's shadow date control, then hypothetically you could animate the changing of the seasons!

Also, I'm still curious about flowering.......is it possible to add a feature for this?

david_h

@stu said:

Dave...youve got me confused now.....how did you explode the tree without seeing it?
But anyway, there is no point in exploding the tree unless you are using it in a renderer like Podium [in which case the square shadow turns into a realistic shadow after rendering]
At the moment, the trees dont cast shadows in SU....unless exploded....and by doing that you also loose the 'face me' capability.

Oh, and Id loose the roots....looks a bit like one of those plastic Xmas trees

Stu . . .I didn't see it in Podium, that 's what I meant. When I exploded for a Podium view, It didn't render shadows at all. I will keep playing with it. and that was my first tree with this program. you're abso. Right. the Roots are bad. Walmart Xmas tree was my first thought as well. But I was just seeing how to do it and what it offered.

Thx,

D

gaganraj

i'm unable to install. is anyone else having issues? it said i was missing a certain .dll file and to reinstall. I tried that a few times, to no avail. then all of a sudden my license for v7 says its expired?!

Al Hart

@gaganraj said:

i'm unable to install. is anyone else having issues? it said i was missing a certain .dll file and to reinstall. I tried that a few times, to no avail. then all of a sudden my license for v7 says its expired?!

We just posted a new version.

Give it a try.

If it says it is missing a DLL, try to note which one it is.

Downloads are available from:

http://www.renderplus.com/pdf/download.htm

Al Hart

We uploaded a new version which:

Clips the roots at the ground - right now we make an image which includes roots below the ground. That is useful sometimes, but much too confusing.
Creates the image (and component) so that the center of the bottom of the trunk is at the center of the image (and component)

Downloads are available at: http://www.renderplus.com/pdf/download.htm

Al Hart

@earthmover said:

This is exciting! The idea of changing seasons is great. What if there were some magical way to tie a dynamic component into sketchup's shadow date control, then hypothetically you could animate the changing of the seasons!

Also, I'm still curious about flowering.......is it possible to add a feature for this?

I chatted with the developer today. He plans to add seasons someday - but he isn't quite sure how he would do it. I suggested allowing 4 leaf images per tree and using one for each season. But he says you will also want to change leaf density, size, etc. So for now, we are going to take an approach were you create different .ArPlant definitions for each season and we will combine 2 or more into a single plant by layer.

I also, didn't make much progress in implementing flowers or other items on a tree. One idea would be to create a leaf which is really two leaves and a flower and see if that offers any promise.

Sushij

Hi. I am running SU7 and can not get the shadows to work in SU Podium. They are just always black boxes. Is there something I am missing. I have done everything that was listed above, such as exploding them. But I can not get them to put correct shadows in a render. Thanks for your help. You are doing a great job.

~Jeff

solo

Jeff, I'm going to take a guess that the reason you are not seeing a shadow could be because you have not created a ground plane for the shadow to cast onto maybe?

Stu

Jeff, Im not sure what the problem is....you seem to be having the same trouble as Dave.
What Im doing is exploding, and then for some reason exploding again until the component bounding box is gone and there is just a line outline left...I usually group the image for easier editing but it doesnt seem essential. At this stage you should be left with a square shadow.
With Podium 1.6, I work with the 'dark' shadow slider set to 8 or 10....PNGs seem to produce soft shadows when rendered but I have yet to see a square shadow after rendering.
Im using SU6, SU7, Win XP and Vista

EDIT:....This will ONLY work with Podium 1.6 beta

steelers05

OK i just downloaded this and tried it, but it is killing my computer. Do you have to have a beast of a computer to run this plugin? It literally took 5 minutes to start up and it was so slow running that is was practically unusable. I dont know if it is an installation issue, because it does work and pull up, it just doesnt work fast enough. Anyone had similar issues?