Tree - Plant design

Hello all,
am, looking at some tips on making trees and plants. What are the current ways do they make trees? What about shadows? What about movement, a lively tree moving from the wind? Can shadows move too? I know leaves and/or branches use phantom but what about the trunk? Can trunks that don't use phantom be linked to leaves/branches that use phantom?

The first thing to get about plants is that there are two ways about it:
1. Use the pre-made plants, which can only be scaled and rotated. These one-prim plants will sway in the wind (and like anything that sways, it's phantom), and will look somewhat intricate close up, but extremely simple from a distance.
Or,
2. Put some prims together to make your own plants.

Now the second of these is, perhaps obviously, more challenging, and more prone to use up prims, but it's the only way to make a plant look just like you want it.
-The only way to make normal prims sway in the wind is to make them flexible (and thus, once again, phantom). Currently the only way to make flexible prims sway together is to put them all in the same location, with the same length and flexi properties. You'll probably want to set those properties relatively stiff so that they stand up, but also relatively strongly affected by the wind.
-No, a single linked object can't contain both phantom and non-phantom prims.
-Shadows are a funny problem, as cast shadows aren't a natural part of SL. For the right effect you'd have to have a texture of a blackened plant shape against a clear background, which you'd put on a prim on the ground. Getting this to actually sway with the wind sounds much too tricky, but hey, you can try making that prim flexible and seeing what happens. Some advanced scripting tricks might also be able to pick up on the wind direction&velocity and respond interestingly. Without either of those, any shadow animation would have nothing to do with the current wind. (Texture animation, by the way, typically involves dividing a texture up into any number of rectangular frames, which are animated (regularly or randomly) by a simple (or at least commonplace) script.)

ALrighty, thanks for the explanation on this.....will start experimenting...

Hi Gusher, this is an excellent question. Although I haven't tried building trees yet, I am very interested in them.

I would recommend that you use some sort of prim trunk for any medium to large size tree. I find that trees made entirely of a picture on flat prims (usually 2-4 flat prims intersecting vertically) look rather funny where they meet the ground. They are usually fine for viewing from a distance, but if you want people to be able to walk near them, a 3-D trunk is much better looking.

Also pay attention to the prim edges for the flat parts with alpha textures (transparent parts). Many builders just assign the texture to the entire prim, but this makes the very thin edges visible from many angles, totally ruining the effect. The better way to do it is to give the entire prim a totally transparent texture, and then put the tree/branch/foliage texture just on the two main prim faces.

Looking forward to seeing your work. Especially if you think you might do something other than tropical plants and palm trees... I have yet to see a good redwood tree in SL!

Great thread!
I am familiar with plants/trees made from intersected flat prims. However, I've also seen those one prim trees (made by a linden, Eric perhaps?), and would love to know how they are done. Any tutorial out there?

Ava Glasgow@ Thanks for interest and the extra tips and yes I already have something to show but sadly I did want to make a Date Palm tree, but I also made another tree.....here's a picture below...

Sue Saintlouis@ Absolutely, I agree with you there... I did see some trees inworld made by Eric Linden, but I noticed something about them....seems they were animated externally? They also can't be examined how it was made......also noticed it has LODs? Or is it SL engine doing that?


http://img73888.pictiger.com/images/12967460/
http://img73888.pictiger.com/images/12974003/

Those are Linden trees, and they can't be created by us mere mortals. They have a number of unique qualities, such as:
- count as one prim
- unique LOD effect... go from flat prim look to detailed 3-D prims
- sway from the ground (client effect)
- can't be linked
- can only be rezzed on land you own (even if build is allowed)

There are also things called Linden grasses, which will follow the contour of the ground regardless of terraforming. You can see pictures of both Linden trees and Linden grasses on my inventory web site:

http://inventory.wavescrashing.org/plants

*seconded*

This is very important to get good results, and a pretty common mistake at the same time. It SO ruins the effect if you can see pixels from the small side. I cannot understand how designers overlook that.

It's well worth following Ava's advice and start fully transparent, then texturing only the sides to be visible.

Do you have further information on how they were created? Inworld or externally? Also, where can we get these Linden trees/plants?

They are in your library folder in your inventory


Note to Ava's post ....... as far as I know texturing the "thin" sides of plants as transparacies makes for more textures to rez, so even though it looks prettier it also makes for more "lag", despite evereyone probably having the transaparent texture seen anyway? Yah the edges don't look good but the main image might show more quickly?

dunno

All I know is that they are a special type of object, and that only LL has the power to create new ones.


Two ways...

1) Check the Library folder in your inventory. There should be a folder called plants or landscaping, and you will find them in there. These will generally show Eric Linden as the creator, and if you put down multiple copies of the same tree, they will all be the same size and rotation.

2) Create them from the Edit window. When you have the Edit window open and 'Create' selected, you can select different types of objects to create (cubes, spheres, toruses, etc.).

[picture was here, but disappeared]

The last two types are Linden trees and Linden grasses. Click 'Keep tool selected' and then just click away on your land... random trees or grasses will be created, of various types, sizes, and rotations. Sometimes they won't be an appropriate type (like trees underwater instead of kelp), but you can just delete the ones you don't want. If I remember correctly, trees and grasses created this way will list you as the creator.

BTW, that picture comes from Xah Lee's building tutorial:

http://xahlee.org/sl/build.html

ETA: Okay, that's weird... the picture disappeared.

Well, it does add one more texture to be rezzed, but if you use a good one it should be small (it only needs to be a single pixel, but I think mine is 32x32... I don't know if there is a minimum size or not). Still, the lag from a single small additional texture is negligible. I guess technically we could texture everything as plain plywood if we were that worried about it.

Thanks alot! Btw, I saw some plants in the same manner as Linden's but made by someone else........

Yep, those are the ones created through the Edit window. Unless you mean you see some that aren't pictured on my inventory web site (URL given above). If so, let me know where you've seen them... I am always looking for good trees.

The one-prim Linden trees are library objects built into the game engine, server-side. That is why we mere mortals can't make them. We'd have to get our products added to the next asset server build.