FORESTER EXPANSION PACK
| | PRICE £88 ($107, €101) DEVELOPER 3Dquakers WEBSITE www.3dquakers.com
New tree models aplenty!
O riginally a plugin for Softimage, Forester was ported to Cinema 4D in 2015. After a dozen minor updates and bug fixes, we’ve finally received the first major addition in the shape of an expansion pack.
Basically, it’s a collection of 51 trees – some real, some fictional – consisting of a traditional mixture of broadleaves and conifers. The trees come in three different variations: Adult, Young and a Low-poly version, which is ideal for distant objects or creating instanced forests. And since the meshes are all procedural, they can still be edited in Forester, providing a practically unlimited array of species and forms.
The pack works hand in hand with Forester 1.3.0, which supports the ability to have three different materials applied to the new tree’s leaves. These are added directly from the expansion pack window, and come in all the most popular render engine formats. You can choose from Spring, Summer and Fall colour schemes and the leaves are also alpha mapped, giving them a more realistic shape when rendered. These additions make a huge difference to the quality of Forester’s output: the newly detailed leaves now stand up to close scrutiny, and trees look far more realistic from a distance, thanks to the variation in leaf materials.
The floating window works in conjunction with the plugin, and generating new trees or swapping an existing tree for a new species is a simple, oneclick action. One minor niggle is that if, for example, you’re modifying trees using low-poly models with three textures and a non-standard render engine, should you inadvertently close the panel, all those choices are reset when you re-open it. A nice touch would be to have them stored for the next time you recall the panel. Also, it would be useful if the thumbnails changed to reflect the choice of season; you have no idea what the Summer or Fall variations look like without creating a tree and adding the leaf textures.
This first Forester Expansion Pack isn’t exactly a must-have purchase, mainly because the plugin is so fully featured as it stands. But if you need a greater variety of trees or, more importantly, are looking for increased realism without additional work, this pack provides just that. It adds some great workflow tweaks and provides substantial visual improvements with the minimum of effort. Cinema 4D artists who use the plugin on a regular basis will love the increased quality and range of trees on offer.