Good old Flamingo had some pretty nifty trees and bushes that was rendered at rendertime, could this library be used for realtime rendering now that the graphiccards has become so much more powerful and Rhino handles instances better?
I know that Rhino Lands (partly?) uses this or an evolution of this library, but not all architects has that installed, so I think a standalone plants option would be great.
This isn’t as advanced as SpeedTree or Vue’s planteditor (now discontinued), but would still be a huge improvement over using instances of meshes.
@jeff I know you had some pretty amazing gpu only render stuff going on back in the days and speedy rendering of plants would be awesome (mesh shaders? was that what you called it?)
It’d be awesome if Flamingo’s plant generator could be extracted as a plugin, to generate plant meshes, so that generated plants are reproducible. As far as I understand, back in Flamingo, a given plant rendered differently each time, because the final plant mesh was only generated at rendering time. If the plant generator could just output the mesh after the plant is edited/customized, that would be a great addition to Rhino.
It is the render-time plant’s that are interesting in my opinion, as this keeps the file light. If you want meshes then I recommend downloading vue plant factory (bentley) use the 2023 versions, the 2024 are beta versions and was never released.
Test out the plant catalog too, it might be just what you need then.
Keep in mind that I have not tested these versions, it’s been around 10 years since last I played around with them, so the installing and use might require some assistance that I can not give
