Every so often I run across a tool or so that has some potential and often times it is a free tool.
Lately I been working on some plants and wanted to make a few different kinds of plants just for fun. Since I am no artist I have to use programming and texturing I can get free or very low cost. Most of the texturing I do use is from cgtextures. A long time ago I downloaded Plantstudio (which is free now) but I was still a bit behind the curve on what to do with it since I had no clue about UV mapping at the time. Last week I started playing around with it and made a few plants.
This is a very unique program because you can make 2 plants and cross breed them to make several varieties. The program does not UV map the meshes it exports so you have to manually do it but the results are worth it.
Here are a couple screens of plants I made and cross bred. Each plant took a couple hours to make from design to final mesh.
I also started playing around with ngplant since I have a bit more confidence in using it now. This program is another free open source one that is just amazing if you take the time to learn how to use it.
Of course noting is complete unless we have a video. In this small scene there are two grass models I made form the creative commons public domain images, a shrub from ngplant, a tree from blender, 8 different plants from plantstudio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9mlUCUpZ8
edit 2 - the links.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_pl...dio.html22
http://ngplant.sourceforge.net/
http://www.blender.org/