PlantFactory : Learn how to create and refine high quality 3D plants

Learn how to Create, Refine and Export High-Quality Animated 3D Plants

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About PlantFactory

PlantFactory is a ground-breaking 3D vegetation modeling, animation and rendering software, with application to the CG, SFX, Architecture and Gaming communities.

With PlantFactory you can:

• Create any kind of vegetation, from simple grass to elaborate trees.
• Create your vegetation by painting it, assembling simple building blocks, or completely graphing all plant properties.
• Generate procedural geometry and materials of unlimited detail
• Animate all plant aspects using precise wind and breeze algorithms
• Export your 3D vegetation to your preferred application as standard .OBJ, .3DS, .C4D, .LWO, .ABC (alembic) or animated .FBX
• Go back and forth between PlantFactory and ZBrush using the GoZ bridge
• Render stills and animations for your compositing jobs or for use as billboards
• Expand your plant library through the TPF Nursery

The first session will focus on the basics of the software: the interface, manual painting and editing with an introductory example to procedural plant creation. We’ll cover export, integration with Vue PLUS integration with game engines such as the Unreal Engine 4.

The second session will focus on slightly more advanced concepts by showing a project-based walkthrough. You will learn how to create dependencies between different plant parts with or without custom interfaces and how to animate your plants. We will also talk about the different meshing options and the creation of multiple levels of detail in TPF.

Session 1 : Saturday 9th September

1. Getting to know the interface

• Viewport navigation
• Understanding the UI
• Units and options
• Drawing and pruning plants
• Manipulating plants with gizmos
• Working with components and libraries

2. Introduction to procedural plant creation with the graph

• Understanding the concept of node-based modelling
• Exploring different geometry nodes
• Working with randomness
• Creating presets & preset variations
• Creating a new component for painting

3. Export and integration

• Export to and integration with Vue: Ecosystems, Plant Editor, Presets & Preset Variations, OpenGL-display
• Exporting to other applications, including game engines such as the Unreal Engine 4

Session 2 : Sunday 10th September

1. Advanced graph edition: creating dependencies

• Quick recap of the first session
• A project-based walkthrpugh to to illustrate more advanced concepts, such as:
  • Extracting values to drive several plant parameters at once
  • Creating published interfaces
  • Utilizing Age/Health/Season
  • Using the “Miscellaneous”-vegetation nodes to create more elaborate dependencies
  • Understanding curves

2. Types of leaves and wind animation

• Exploring blades, warpboards, the leaf node, billboards and imported geometry for leaf creation for any kind of project
• Understanding wind and breeze: deciphering the algorithm, tweaking wind animation globally and for different types of nodes, creating bones for export

3. Meshing and LOD

• Exploring the available meshing modes
• Full control over resolution with manual meshing and quality boost for individual nodes
• Creating LODs
• Controlling parts of a plant with dedicated nodes based on LOD, e.g. swapping high-res geometry with low-res geometry or turning certain plant parts on and off

About the Presenter : Daniel Seebacher

Daniel Seebacher has been using PlantFactory since its first version and has twelve years of background in VUE. He recently held a PlantFactory webinar on behalf of e-on/Bentley for students of the Bournemouth University in UK. His area of expertise lies in VUE’s Function Editor and PlantFactory’s node-based plant construction. He has contributed preset content and tutorial files to both VUE and PlantFactory and is currently writing a comprehensive book on VUE’s Spectral Cloud System that will unravel advanced node-based techniques for building Cumulonimbus clouds and much more. Daniel was featured in 3D World Magazine and has contributed a chapter to Duncan Evan’s “Digital Mayhem: 3D Landscape Techniques”. In 2010, he was among the finalists of e-on’s 3D Environment Competition.

Besides rendering natural environments, Daniel works in the German publishing industry. He is a trained bookseller and has a Master of Arts Degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich in Publishing. He is currently employed as an Author Relations Manager at one of Germany’s biggest self-publishing platforms and in charge of e-book distribution, marketing and sales for self-publishing authors. In his spare time, he plays in various orchestras and loves all kind of gaming, books and movies.