Plant Factory review

User Interface

The viewports are nice, clean and easy to get the grips with. You can customize them according to your workflow like making the node graph window bigger if you are setting up a new plant or make it go away if you are working with presets only. The plant casts shadows onto the ground plane and you can easily rotate the source light to get a good look at your plant from all angles. Other options include the ability to view the amount of polygons the plant is made of and view the height of the plant. You can easily view the bones of the rig with the click of a button.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off textures in viewports without actually disabling them in the material editor. If you’re on a slow computer and you are using a lot of maps, this can turn into a bit of an issue though it wasn’t really a problem for me on my i3930k with an Nvidia 670 GTX game card. The only other issue to me with the viewports was that it’s really hard to see the wireframe and there’s nowhere to change how they are displayed that I could see. Even when selected, the wireframe is very thin lines of black.

While it’s a small feature, I would like to give major credit to E-on Software for including the option to customize how you navigate your viewports. This really should be a standard feature in all 3D software in my opinion. Since I am used to 3DS Max mostly I was able to quickly set it up so I navigate the viewports the same way. You can also rearrange and resize the different panels to wherever you want them, including putting them on a second screen.

Wind and exporting

What I find very important in any scene that includes plants is the presence of wind. Even on days where there’s very little wind it’s very rare that there’s none. Adding wind gives life to your scene and thankfully Plant Factory includes options for setting up your plant to blow in the wind. With today’s new game consoles having more memory, developers are able to include wind animation in games so it’s not just relevant for pre-rendered scenarios any more. In every node you can specify how flexible you want that part of the plant to be. With the ability to preview wind in the viewport, it’s easy to adjust these settings and immediately see the effects.

While you can export the wind animation as baked into the vertices, you can also export the rig itself including the animation. You have some control over how they are created for optimization’s sake but mainly they are automatically placed along each segment and where new segments are spawned. This rig can then be exported to your 3D software of choice using FBX with or without the wind animation that you’ve set up. If you prefer to export the wind animation baked into the vertices you can do that as well.

On the topic of exporting, I am unhappy that the plant generated is made out of a mix of triangles and quads. This is to optimize the mesh and makes sense most of the time but let’s say you would like to take in the trunk to ZBrush or Mudbox to sculpt on top of it, you don’t have a very clean mesh to subdivide. This is a real shame as often I like to add my own little touches.

Season and Age

There’s also the ability to set up your plants to react according to season and age and setting this up is a bit trickier than just creating a plant. One of the included examples uses some simple Python and a lot of nodes to define the aging and seasons. It’s unfortunate that there’s no way to animate these parameters and export the plants with the animation into your 3D software. However, it is possible to animate these parameters in Vue. Plant Factory and Vue work very well together and you are able to randomize the plants and populate them in Vue quickly.

Rendering

When it comes to rendering, Plant Factory comes with one that seems to be very similar to the one in E-on’s terrain creation tool Vue – most likely based on the same code as the layout and settings are so similar. The preview render mode is fast and gives you a great idea of how your plants will look like in sunlight with global illumination. Bump up the quality a bit and you get some nice anti-aliasing but of course it takes a bit longer to render. Since you’re not really going to be using this for final renders, it does its job for what you need it for but not much more so don’t expect advanced render options.

One annoying thing is that once you’ve reached the set limit of allocated space for storing previous renders, a pop up will appear each time you finish a render and it doesn’t give you the option to delete all old renders so the pop up will keep appearing until you increase the allocated space or go in and manually delete all the old renders.

Grow on objects

Even though I am mentioning this feature last, it is one of Plant Factory’s highlights. Plant Factory allows you to have your plants collide with and grow on any imported geometry. This makes it very easy to create vines or other plants that you want to wrap around an object. It works really well and I was very happy with how fast and stable this option was. This is something that would be time consuming to model by hand but with Plant Factory you can model great looking wall crawling plants in just a few clicks.

Conclusion

Overall Plant Factory is everything I hoped it would be and can be used for both game applications and pre-rendered scenarios. It also integrates very well with Vue for those who like to use the landscape creating software for matte paintings and environments. It has just the right amount of procedural control mixed with artist control so that you are able to create any plant imaginable.

I see myself using it any time I want trees or plants but I do hope they increase the amount of included presets as I do feel this is its weakest point. The other main criticism is how little control you have over the imported geometry node, especially the fact that it does not allow child nodes making it so you can’t spawn other nodes on from your custom geometry. My final verdict of Plant Factory is almost complete praise and a much needed tool that I wish I would have had on many projects in the past but also one that could use a few improvements in the future.

Torbjorn Olsson is a Swedish native who loves to do all things creative. He took every opportunity to fulfill his creative dreams after he got his first taste of 3D in his teenage years, and is currently working as a freelance artist. You can find more about his work at Tobbeo.net.

Related Links:

• PlantFactory's website
• PlantFactory tutorials
• PlantFactory trial version
• E-on Software's website - developers of PlantFactory

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Tags: PlantFactory | plants | trees | vegetation | E-on Software