Greetings all. I am not new to Blender, having been using it to play around with for the last few years. I am not terribly good at it (the Blender 2.3 Guide Book was a huge help), and always had problems making trees. I did find a plugin that didn’t seem to do much (more from my lack of knowledge, I am sure). A while ago I did find the program Forester and its sister program Arboretum. Arboretum made some great looking trees, but there was little I could do with them, as I had no idea what to do with Forester and POVRay.
Then yesterday I realized that Arboretum could export tree meshes in Wavefront Object format (.obj).
And that Blender can import Wavefront objects!
I now have trees.
There is so much that I can do now: spookey forests (just delete the leaf meshes to make bare branches), talking trees (by animating mouths and eyes in the tree mesh), or making Ents (my favorite characters from when I was a child)!
Maybe that is why I am still an amature at this; I have almost 60 projects started and very few (if any) finished!
I just hope that someone can use this to better effect than I probably will. I also hope that this is not something everyone else knows and that I’m a total tech geek.
Christopher (at [email protected])
Yah, obj in-out has been around for a while. Blender’s obj script is very good. The way the latest CVS version handles grouping makes all the difference. I just wish the script wouldn’t arbitrarily rename the materials that are imported. If the names were maintained the mesh could be exported and reuse the same mat file.
Definitely not GE friendly. You figure an hour to generate and then import, and another hour or two to render - for just the one tree, mind you.