[QUOTE=jmalaska;565916]
Thank you! Looking good. And thanks for the quick reply. I’m happy with my purchase so far. I’ve been using it for a little while, and I have some feedback I was hoping could be addressed in the near future:
- How can I get more natural looking trees? I’ve been messing a lot with the settings and I’ve been having trouble getting a more natural tree look. The main branch extends to the top, however in the current trees, the truck stops at the top of the tree without splitting apart. Here are a few of the trees I’m trying to recreate. http://www.lostrivers.ca/img/points/treeform4.gif I was planning on making my own leaves, but I’m just trying to get the trunk and branches looking right.
- Could we get more realistic growth stages? It looks like the leaves scale as a group, though trees grow early with only a few leaves in the sapling stage. This is the holy grail and would need to be simplified, but it’s a nice target
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rCeJwirWPY I think the big thing with the leaves is trying to keep them a consistent size rather than scaling. Maybe with flipbook growth? - Billboards from growth stages don’t update properly: I think this is just a bug. In the test map, I move away from the growth trees so they become billboards. Then I hit the 1-5 buttons for them to grow, but the billboards look weird. http://imgur.com/rZpO1YZ
- Trunks are separated during growing stages? Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Thank you for making this tool! Looking forward to future releases.
[/QUOTE]
I’m very happy that you’re happy!
For now, the trunk doesn’t split, I’ve made this tool to make more stylized trees for my game (it wasn’t aimed for realistic results), but I plan on making an overhaul of this tool for 4.13-4.14. It will include more realistic tree structure (more possibilities, like trunk/branch splitting), new material-based animation system (GPU, more performant) and more features & improvements that should be announced hopefully within a couple of months.
Yes, the growth stages system is simplified, it works for more distant/top-down scenarios, but won’t look realistic from close distance. I’ll see what I can do to improve it, leaves are a planes with opacity-masked texture containing bunch of leaves, so indeed a flipbook may be a solution for creating a custom leaf growth animation…
I’m on vacation right now, outside of my main workstation (I only have my crappy laptop here that barely can handle an empty UE editor ) so I can’t check it directly, but it looks like a bug indeed. The separated trunk bug probably originates from one of UE skeletal mesh bugs (the bugs that stopped me from updating this tool for 4.12).
For incorrect billboard for growth stages, did I understand correctly, you change the growth stages when the trees are in billboard mode? I’ll try to reproduce it on my end.
I’ll see how I can improve these features and fix the bugs when I’m back.
Thank you!