Pawel Olas - LightWave Plug-in: TreesDesigner

Tree Designer Review.
By Bill Simon.

When Cobra offered me a chance to take Pawel Olas's newest plugins Tree Designer and Leaves Generator out for a spin how could I say no. Having to write a review of it is a small price to pay for the power and functionality that these two plugins bring to Lightwave.

Once the plugins are installed its time for the fun to begin. The included HTML manual explains what all the functions of the interface are but most are self explanatory.

The hardest part of working with the plugin is how little information you need to provide it to make trees. Any polygon will do. From a single to as many as you like. Examples of what can be accomplished with a simple box are on Pawel's site. The polys are used like termination points by the plugin. Where ever there is a poly or group of polys is where your tree branches will end. Place these in the background layer and start Tree Generator. All the options are in the numeric requester so you'll have to hit n to bring up the requester. Trees can be generated in 3 on screen formats. Skeleton is the quickest, polygon and NURB. The display and updates of any changes are very quick even in nurbs. Simply make what ever changes you would like to your tree and hit the update button.

Every part of your virtual tree can be tweaked. From the tips of the branches right down to the number, size and shape of the roots. I'll go over some of the best points of the plugin as I see them.

Gravity - Use positive and negative gravity to affect how your tree grows.
End Branch Shift - Use this so all your branches don't end at exactly the same spot in space. Set it to 1m and the branches will end within +/- 1m of the template poly.
Segments - Lets you control the quality by adding or removing segments to your tree.
PRESETS! - I can't stress this one enough! If you like a design that you have come up with and think you might want to use it again... add it to the preset shelf! I thing to keep in mind about the presets is that it ONLY remembers your settings not the tree itself so you'll still need background templates to generate a new tree of the same preset variety.
Random Seed - Need 8 or 9 different looking trees of the same variety? No problem. Build one and change to a new empty layer and change the random seed. Refresh. Change to a new layer and repeat... simple wasn't it.
Texturing your newly created master piece couldn't be easier either. Pawel has graciously set the plugin up so that it creates UV maps for the Branches, Trunk and Roots so you can control every part of the texturing. There is also weight maps assigned so you can use gradients to decrease the bump or blend texture transitions from the thicker part of the branch out to the tip.

Now...is it perfect. No.. Damn close but there is still a human involved, That would be you and I. If you give it ridiculous settings it will give you a ridiculous looking tree. There are times that you'll get a lone floating branch that just isn't quite attached to the tree. Its just a simple case of grabbing a couple (4) points and dragging it "into" the trunk. That is the only flaw I've seen while using it and that too may be an error on my part. Still a 2 second fix is VERY minor. I have many commercial plugins that I WISH only had slight errors like this one.

There is so much more that I could cover but that would end up being more of a tutorial than a review. For an excellent tutorial on what it can do and a real in-depth look at all the functions in action take a look at the tutorial section on Pawel's Site.

Conclusions. If you are going to be rendering any outdoor scenes or need vegetation of any kind then this is it, no need to look any further. At $100.00 US for Tree Designer and $80.00 US for Leaves Generator ( $150.00 US if you buy both ) it will become your best friend and quickly pay for itself just by saving you scouring the web for Trees or trying to build them yourself.

This review is copied from LWG3D. Here is original one. Many thanks to Bob McKain and Bill Simon for help :-)