Wings 3D Development Forum

I keep seeing all these ways you are utilizing interesting procedural noise types to create interesting shapes. . . but a lot of them tend to stay in more obscure/abstract uses. I wonder if you have thought of ways of making more "useful" uses.

One of my favorite plugins to lightwave's modeler is a plugin called TreesDesigner.

http://www.polas.net/trees/

It lets you model the very basic shape of a tree and then the software "grows" a fractal pattern out from a defined base up into the volume of where you want the branches to be. Seems like you already have everything you need to do this with the combinations of your plugins. . . No? It would be awesome if you could take it a step further and let the user define the shape of the trunk at it's base, the place where the branches start to split and how far they continue to split until they are "done" and your tree is made.

If you wanted more customization in for example ... your TREE-PROCESS ...
create a few different trunks ... a few different mid-levels ... and then use color-cues as placment cues.

If I was to try to go head-to-head with a real tree generator ... I would fail miserably ... especially in this Wings manifold environment. What I have is a FIT-ON tool ... that you can make TREES with it ... is your choice .

But the request is thought provoking ... I mean ... if Wings3D and manifoldlab had a few things more .. it would be more well suited to your task.

1) Ability to FREEZE an asset to some more compact form rather than WEDS. Take a maleable object and call it finished. This would allow Wings3D to be more passive in its treat ment of the finalized thing and after a fashion ... just hold onto it for your graphics card.

2) Along the lines of (1) ... maybe an ability to stream finalized stuff into a much more robust render stream of some sort ... a scene stream / render stream of things that are camera ready.

Without something akin to te above ... tree-making is never gonna be sexy in Wings3D.

Well ... that's how I feel.

I'm only really worried about the trunk/branches themselves. The leaves are easy to instance on later. A "bolt the branches on" approach would generate a model that was not one solid mesh. Just branches shoved into other branches. I'd love a fractal that could be grown out a defined area and when it sees that it has entered a volume, split, and keep splitting until it has left that volume and "end".

I don't need all the pretty stuff. . . Just the ability to shape the growth of a fractal.

No ... the bolt branches on ... welds as it bolts. That's how it has always worked for me with fit on.

So you get a single manifold in the end.