
The Grove 8 – Growing Trees in Blender - juretriglav
https://www.thegrove3d.com/releases/the-grove-release-8/
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tux1968
This is very cool.

Over $500 USD for this Blender plugin and the 38 Twigs they currently have on
offer is chicken feed for any professional use. But it sure is a lot for
casual use and playing around.

Blender 2.8 comes with a Tree generation plugin that isn't as sophisticated as
this one, but still can be quite impressive.

Preferences -> Add-on -> Add Curve : Sapling Tree Gen

Actually it predates version 2.8 by quite a bit, here is an older video of how
to use the plugin on a previous version of Blender:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlRF5S0aHwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlRF5S0aHwU)

~~~
antiuniverse
Very impressive, and I'm also seriously tempted to look into a pipeline to
take these into Unreal Engine as an alternative to SpeedTree.

There's something I've been curious about, though, which is that since Blender
is licensed under the GPL, aren't all these add-ons also forced to release
under a GPL license? Which means the first person to pay the ~$500 is legally
within their rights to reupload this product for the rest of the world to
download freely?

Not trying to troll, though I worry it may come across that way. It's just
that I've actually had a friend try to convince me to work on Blender add-ons
for supplemental income, and it seemed like a bad idea for that reason... so
I'd like to make sure I'm not missing something.

(I guess you can make the case that all the comparable non-GPL software gets
pirated too, but this seemed somehow more demoralizing to me.)

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TylerE
Blender plugins are python. No linkage.

~~~
antiuniverse
Hmm, I swear this must be new since last time I checked the Blender site, but
it seems to address my concerns very succinctly, and apparently that's not
relevant:

> Sharing or selling Blender add-ons (Python scripts)

> Blender’s Python API is an integral part of Blender, used to define the UI
> or develop tools for example. The GNU GPL license therefore requires that
> such scripts (if published) are being shared under a GPL GPL compatible
> license. You are free to sell such scripts, but the sales then is restricted
> to the download service itself. Your customers will receive the script under
> the same license, with the same free conditions as everyone has for Blender.
> Sharing Blender or its scripts is always OK and not piracy.

~~~
vetinari
This one looks like standalone application, that has integration plugin into
Blender. Otherwise, you can export into other 3D packages and not use Blender
at all.

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_ah
I love this. Here is a tree modeling tool created by someone who _really loves
trees_. There's no other way to describe it.

Anyone else would have been happy to stop at "good enough" trees, but here the
attention to detail with light, gravity, wind, and relentless comparison to
nature creates a result that it beautiful and "right" on a subtle level that's
hard to describe. I feel happier knowing that people like this creator exist
in the world. We should all aspire to such dedication in our craft!

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dforrestwilson
I wish all video games had this level of scientific depth underlying them.

~~~
dahart
As an ex console games developer, I'd say they absolutely do. There may be a
difference in the fidelity & geometric complexity of the output, and it's not
all a singular focus by one person or as pretty as the trees made by Grove8,
but the methods being used even in mobile games are building on decades of
compounding scientific work. Procedural geometry and shading models are just
the easy ones to point at, but generally speaking, physics, AI, design,
gameplay, and art are all compounding as well.

~~~
derefr
For the physics and art, maybe. But how about NPC AI in e.g. a market-
arbitrage game, that shows known psychological biases that can be exploited?
Or a damage system in an FPS where people/creatures get weaker and slower as
they get hurt, and leave blood trails to find them by if they’re not careful?
Or how about an item crafting system that’s just regular chemistry, requiring
complex glassware setups, catalysts, ice baths, filtering and distilling, fume
hoods, etc.?

Games sure don’t seem to favor fidelity when it comes to the “game” part. :)

~~~
dahart
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. What you’re talking about is gameplay
ideas that involve the player doing realistic things. What I was talking about
is game engines that use scientific research in the construction of game
engine features. You’re bringing up an entirely different concept. And I
agree, and even said before, that fidelity doesn’t match these film style
assets. The whole point is that looking at fidelity is not the way to gauge
how deep the underlying techniques are.

~~~
derefr
Enemy AI, damage systems, crafting systems, etc. are still—at least
potentially—game engine components. They’re thought of as “application layer”
components of individual games because games don’t tend to share any code for
these, rather coming up with their own implementations (usually just some
finite-state machines.)

But if you had an in-engine system for doing realistic chemistry (maybe in
bulk, on a voxel or particle level, on the GPU) then that’d be less of a
gameplay idea, and more a module to drop into a game’s _physics_ , no? Sort of
like soft-body dynamics is a module to drop into a physics engine. It’d just
be part of the game’s physics that’d _constrain_ the way that a crafting
system must be implemented if you’re using it; sort of like how using
kinematics engines constrains the way you implement vehicles.

If the entire game is full of tracked atmospheric gases; and the heat of these
gasses can convect into nearby solids/liquids; and the gasses can also
condense if they get too cold, and things can crash out of liquid solutions if
the liquids get colder, etc.; then inherently you’re going to be able to build
things like a distillation apparatus under such physics; and inherently you’re
probably _not_ going to be able to build a Minecraft-like arbitrary-crafting
system without going “out-of-engine” in a difficult way (because now you have
to worry about how popping things into existence affects air pressure—you’ll
be fighting the “chemistry engine” every step of the way to building it!)

And, also, you’ll get side-considerations, like it being hard _not_ to have a
weather system in games using such an engine, because each zone of bounded
size inherently becomes a terrarium where the “ceiling” can form condensation.
(And there _would have to be_ such a ceiling—in fact, a whole physically-
simulated “world box”—otherwise the gas escapes! Unless you want an Earth-
sized spinning zone to keep your atmosphere sucked down...) Again, you’d have
to fight the engine to use it but _not_ have realistic weather. It’d be a lot
easier to “trick” the engine by just putting materials into the game that
would have the same _real properties_ that would create an illusion of there
being no weather in a real terrarium (i.e. a really big air conditioner,
sitting “outside” the terrarium-edge-box, like the ceiling in _The Truman
Show_.)

Or, in the sense of a damage system, I’m not really talking about the gameplay
concept of a damage system, but rather choosing to implement player-
controllable avatars (and mobs, and everything else “living” in the game) in
terms of a scripted or player-controlled “mind” commanding a faithfully
biologically-emulated “body” to move (think “body as kinematically-simulated
robot, that has a movement AI, and accepts goal-pathing instructions; player
control/NPC AI as source of such pathing instructions.”) And, since the body
would be physical, entities would only be able to do what their bodies are
able to do—such that if an entity’s body gets damage to a crucial muscle or
organ, its body is now less able to _follow commands to run_ , however much
the control-layer sending those commands wants it to run. Sure, from a top-
down sense, that’s a “choice of damage system”; but from a bottom-up sense,
that’s a physiology modelling engine that could be put into any game engine
and used for any number of things (from a game about trying to stab your
opponent in their vital organs, to a game about poisoning, to a _Wii Fit_
-like game that tries to model which of your muscle-groups will tire first,
to...)

Consider why we have a “physics engine” in the first place. 2D games back in
the 80s and 90s mostly just implemented one-off physics at the application
layer; but then, soon after entering 3D, we wanted _real_ physics, and there’s
only _one_ “real physics” to model, so we started reusing and generalizing our
logic for “real” physics out into physics _engines_ , and started building the
“game physics logic” for games that wanted _mostly_ -realistic physics, as
just a policy layer on top of such a generic real-physics engine.

That’s what I’m talking about here: there are other such “engines” we could
have, which would be scientifically-sound models of reality that players could
predict the behaviour of based on their knowledge of the real world, where in-
game systems could then be implemented the way most 3D games’ physics systems
are: as configurations of, and scripting hooks into, a few polished, flexible,
generic models.

~~~
whatshisface
The simulations you're talking about are beyond what can be done on our
biggest supercomputers today. Games with realistic chemistry would be a great
application of personal quantum computers. See you in fifty years. ;)

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joveian
While not realistic in most ways, I enjoyed the 2d trees in A Valley Without
Wind, very colorful and they change some with the day/night cycle. Also, you
could "shrink" trees (and other objects) into your inventory and bring them
back to your base to decorate.

A couple of screenshots:

[https://www.gamingnexus.com/Images/Article/rlcxpg3498/12.jpg](https://www.gamingnexus.com/Images/Article/rlcxpg3498/12.jpg)

[https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/12/may/valley5.jpg/R...](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/12/may/valley5.jpg/RPSS/resize/690x-1/format/jpg/)

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trashE
Very cool! Would like to learn blender just so I could use such tools.

~~~
keyle
Blender 2.8 is much easier to pick up after a major revamp of the interface,
it's far more friendly to get into.

Eventually you'll move on from using any of the icons and shortcut everything
anyway, because you can be so blazing fast.

Try it out, it's fun and free.

~~~
andybak
Blender 2.8 looks like an improvement but as someone fairly adept in
Photoshop, Illustrator, 3DS Max, After Effects, Ableton, Unity etc I still
find it one of the trickiest apps to wrap my head around.

It's not that the apps I already know have an especially good UX or that
Blender is especially bad - it's just that Blender makes few concessions to
existing conventions and doesn't provide much in terms of discoverability.

2.8 is definitely a step in the right direction but lets not get ahead of
ourselves in praising it as suddenly becoming a paragon of usability.

~~~
soulofmischief
_doesn 't provide much in terms of discoverability_

Space or Shift-Space or whatever the new 2.8 default shortcut is opens up an
action menu with every possible action available to you and a search bar to
explore them.

Actually, with this feature Blender surpasses most other creative suites in
terms of discoverability. Perhaps what you are really looking for is a
tutorial? They have those, too.

~~~
Crinus
Yeah, back when 2.5 was new i was annoyed that space changed from showing the
popup menu in 3D view to showing that action search list but this annoyance
quickly went away when i realized how faster it was to find new stuff with it.

~~~
soulofmischief
Shift+A makes sense for the new default 3D menu though, it's Shift+A(dd)

~~~
Crinus
IIRC the pre-2.5 menu wasn't just for adding stuff (though it was its most
common use).

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wodenokoto
> The unique year-by-year simulation is a beautiful animation unfolding right
> before your eyes. But there was no way to record this animation, and no way
> to render it.

I don't understand how you could watch it but not record it, in older
versions.

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solotronics
When I see stuff like this I wonder if we are already in a simulation.

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savolai
It took me quite a while to realize the title was talking about Blender the
software, and not about the kitchen appliance.

At the end of the the first video I was still convinced this was about actual
organic trees. :)

~~~
rubyfan
I thought it was only me. I read it as “Growing Trees in _a_ blender” and
expected some sort of biology or other science article.

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ryanackley
If you're looking for something similar for game development, check out
speedtree. It has a comparable feature set. Also, has a relatively low month-
to-month fee.

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mehtaib
Any research paper which goes into more detail about how they achieve the
growth animation?

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youdontknowtho
Does the video freak anyone else out? It's amazing, but something in my lizard
brain just kicked me. I guess I'm saying I have some issues.

