PLANTFACTORY 2016
| | Price $199 (Artist) to $1,995 (Producer) COMPANY E-on Software website www.e-onsoftware.com
The latest update provides both hero and animated plant functionality, and more
E -on Software’s latest update to its procedural plant generator, Plantfactory 2016 provides both hero and animated plant functionality. Still only three releases old, it nicely fills the standalone gap between hero plant modeller The Grove and film- and gaming-oriented Speedtree.
Like the other generators, Plantfactory’s graph and nodebased approach makes it a powerful and versatile addition to your vegetation toolbox, and it will generate gorgeouslooking vegetation and procedural models in no time.
Plantfactory 2016 makes a small splash rather than big waves, and this release offers a little bit of everything; it now sports plant preset variations and improved editing options and parameters, as well as its two new features.
The Growth node provides all of a plant’s architecture in a single node rather than the node spaghetti Plantfactory can generate when creating and detailing your vegetation node for node. It also enables you to tailor it down to the smallest detail, from growth under specific lighting or shadow conditions, to duration, to being able to define where the next bud sprouts or grows. Putting all this into one node just made Plantfactory a whole lot faster and easier to use.
Plantfactory 2016 also comes with new LOD functionality for offline or realtime use. It’s still a little basic compared to Speedtree’s offerings, but what’s currently there looks promising. As well as four LOD levels, Plantfactory offers basic skinning and Ecosystem quality functionality. Plantfactory now also lets you output quads, which must be a relief for those who’ve tangoed with Plantfactory’s tangled tris.
The LOD Meshing UI could use a little TLC, though, as entering data in some of its fields doesn’t seem to be undoable. It’s small stuff like this which pulls this solid release down. Some more QA wouldn’t have hurt: as well as the ‘Undo’ issue, an export-import check in the Unreal Editor might have caught some UV issues, and a double-check in the documentation would have caught Unity headers in the Unreal docs. This is just minor hassle, but it does look sloppy.
New software always needs time for people to adopt it, and this is where Plantfactory faces a major challenge, due to its EULA. At the time of writing, there are still severe constraints on the output of software many paid hundreds or well over a thousand dollars for.
You still cannot sell, or give away any static plants created in Plantfactory without explicitly mentioning they were created in Plantfactory. Nor can you share or sell the Plantfactory file itself anywhere but via E-on’s Cornucopia3d portal. In effect this means you have no choice but to comply with the developer’s demand that your creation(s) be used for advertising and traffic. For many users, that’s just not OK. Hopefully this will change, as Plantfactory is good.