Space Tree Pro, a new tree add-on

Hi all,

Some of you may have noticed that activity on my blog was a bit slow lately but my energy was spent on another exciting project: I am happy to announce that my new tree add-on, Space Tree Pro, is available on Blender Market.


It’s a logical evolution from my free space tree add-on and it features, among other things, a hugely improved user interface focused on an easy work flow, persistent settings that are saved with your tree for later tweaking, interaction with the grease pencil, a comprehensive manual, ready to use sample trees and a set of video tutorials. I hope you’ll like it and feedback is welcome as always. I will of course continue to write free stuff as well, I haven’t gone over to the dark side completely :smiley:

yeah :slight_smile: great add-on!!

hi, looks awesome!
Given that the old version is still in Addons_Contrib, is it ok to remove it now?
No use misrepresenting the nice new version you wrote. :slight_smile:

I was thinking of removing as I clean up contrib slowly, then find this, so I think it makes sense.

Thanks for all the cool addons you write. :slight_smile:

@@varkenvarken I suggest you to make auto updation the tree … it will be more handy … though you can make a button to turn auto update off and on … nice addon btw :slight_smile:

@meta-androcto: no problem but i wouldn’t want to deny people access to the older, free version (in fact i intend to keep on supporting it) . so maybe you can put a link in the ‘external addons’ wikipage?

@SKworld: thank you and your suggestion is a good one but generating trees on a slower machine can take some time and i didn’t want to give people the feeling their machine was hanging. The option i am thinking about now is to measure how much time an update takes and switch to manual when it takes more than 100 milliseconds our so.

varkenvarken hi,
I’m happy if you update the free version in contrib. :slight_smile:

This is pretty sweet looking, I especially like the grease pen system you put into it. The only thing that kinda bugs me is that the leafs don’t really feel that good to me, not so much the textures but how they grow and the shape/size of them feels off in your examples. They just look too artificial. Overall it looks really promising though.

As a side thing, I’m not sure if you’re willing to do this but:

http://www.plantfactory-tech.com/overview/

Just putting in some of these features would be amazing.

Anyway, I’m glad someone is trying to do this. Blender desperately needs a decent plant generation system. Ivygen is all but forgotten…

@RealityFox: thanks for your feedback. I agree that the leaves can be better, they are very low poly at the moment and mostly based on 3 shape variants. I noticed it especially on the magnolia leaves but other leaves can benefit form some extra love as well. I will certainly direct some attention to it in future upgrades.
As for plant factory, it sure looks great but the amount of development time needed for such a program is more than I can spare (and it reflects in the price tag of course). Meanwhile, for those herbaceous plants http://ngplant.sourceforge.net/ might still be a good alternative. As for IvyGen, that still is a great add-on, and was in fact an inspiration. Space Tree Pro is however quite capable of generating climbers as well, with some extra control even when you use the grease pencil as shown in the rose tutorial, but it’s up to the user to decide which one is easier to use.

Meanwhile, I got a couple of questions about conifers (like pine, spruce, etc.) and although the algorithm used favours trunk and branch patterns characteristic of deciduous trees, with some experimentation and a proper particle system I made some progress.


The settings can be found in this article.

I have really bad problem with this. What ever settings i use, i always end up with this kind of really bad looking model. Is there any way to get this working? Or am i doing something wrong?


Hi Arman,

I am not sure if I understand you correctly but does your tree not change when you change settings? In that case you might have forgotten to click ‘update tree’, which is needed to implement the changes (this may sound counter intuitive but generating a tree might take quite a long time on some computers so I followed the example from IvyGen with an explicit update to prevent people from thinking their computer was frozen).

Or are you able to change the settings but you don’t like the results? I cannot see all the settings, especially from the crown tab and of course your tree doesn’t have leaves but you might want to try some of the example trees provided with the add-on. They are the actual trees used in creating the promotional images and you can import them from the example blend files like any other object and then tweak them with the add-on to your liking. (Just don forget to enable the add-on)

I mean that the branches appear in very strange areas and also their skinning not work very well. There is a huge amount of this kind of useless geometry than i don’t know how to fix:


Overall the script works very well. It updates fastly and does not crash my blender, so that part i am happy with. But i just don’t know how to do nice looking trees with it. :smiley:

@ArMan:

how many small side branches are formed is mainly dependent on two factors: the number of endpoints and the number of additional endpoints per generation. Especially the last one causes more ‘bushiness’.

Furthermore there are a number of factors that influence the shape of the skin:

  • I’ve chosen for an simple, all quad mesh. This is fast to generate, even on less powerful computers. Another approach would be to either use the Skin Modifier (which is horribly slow for complex meshes) or convert the mesh skeleton to a curve. This might look nicer in closeup but can lead to a fairly high polycount and is difficult to textures (because of unwrapping issues). You kan still do that manually if you like: if you don skin the tree, you can either add a skin modifier or convert it to a curve and and a bevel and see hwo that looks.
  • The skeleton mesh is rather course, but you can improve that with a shorter branch segment length. This will make the branches look smoother (even more so with a subdivision modifier, especially if you increase the number of subdivisions to 2 or 3) but the skin will remain rather loose in the inside corners. In the release I am currently working on this will we improved somewhat by adding an edge crease to some of the edges.

As an example I included a screenshot with the relevant properties highlighted (click to enlarge):


For those interested: I have made a sample tree made with Space Tree Pro available for free.


It´s a hazel tree based on one of the hazels in my backyard. Comes with alpha-mapped leaves and procedural bark. You read more and download the .blend from here. The tree is distributed with its associated Space Tree Pro settings as object properties so people who have purchased the add-on can tweak it further if they like.

The same tree was used as a basis for the hazel trees in this promotional scene (which by the way also makes use of Andrew Priceś amazing grass essentials):


Enjoy.