MeshTree Studio

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 8:32 pm

After a lot of wasted time I can finally release it. Sorry for this delay, but I just have started my studies (Computer Science btw) and they are much more important than my hobby project.

This is based on MeshTree Project by Sputnick, and is continuation of my MeshTree Editor project (released before in Artist & Content Creators forum). You can generate unlimited types of trees just by editing various parameters and clicking Generate. Some features are not developed yet (for example LOD, I decided to wait for Billboard Clouds SoC project). Any kind of feedback would be appreciated, especially testing and posting your own .mtd files.

Default & defined material names are: BarkTextMat and LeafTextMat.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to generate tangents for tree meshes, so per-pixel lighting has to wait for better times

Screenshot:

Package, containing source code (or should I say, mess code

):
link
Additional download location

BTW This is my first WinForms app ever (C++/CLI).

Please comment.
I hope you will enjoy it!

Alexander · Post by **Alexander** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 9:57 pm

Congrats on the new release. I am downloading the package now.

I wanted to ask how exactly you were intending on implementing the billboard cloud project into Mesh Tree Studio.

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 10:47 pm

No idea yet

I intend to get involved later, when I have some free time for this.

Wretched_Wyx · Post by **Wretched_Wyx** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 5:10 am

This is really cool! Great job on this. My only suggestion so far, is a little bit more camera control... Perhaps hold down middle mouse button to rotate, and scroll it to zoom in/out. Right mouse to pan.

Again, this is great. Keep up the good work.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 11:44 am

erm i am a newbie and i dont know how to apply both the 2 textures together onto the tree mesh that generated from the editor?

my code:

Code: Select all

		Entity* ent1 = mSceneMgr->createEntity("Robot","tree.mesh");
		ent1->setMaterialName("LeafTextMat");

and the result:

the bark become leaves...

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 3:34 am

or it doesnt need any setMaterialName?

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 1:42 pm

It doesn't need that

You can set material names in MTS. But if you want to do it manually in code, assign materials to subentities. Because this:

Code: Select all

ent1->setMaterialName("LeafTextMat");

assigns one material to the whole entity.

// edit: btw, why do you need tree with this kind of detail?

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 2:31 pm

btw, why do you need tree with this kind of detail?

just for testing

because the editor looks cool

yuriythebest · Post by **yuriythebest** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:02 pm

very nice- the variations of trees achievable by changing leave, branch numbers is awsome. Any chance of a 3ds/obj exporter?

yuriythebest · Post by **yuriythebest** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 4:10 pm

heh, you left the part out about it being a swell bush generator as well

Post by **jacmoe** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:40 pm

That's some hairy bush you've made there!

Post by **Praetor** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 6:49 pm

That is the bushiest bush i've ever seen.

Post by **Falagard** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 10:51 pm

Nice work. If you play with the settings you can get low poly trees that look pretty good (under 3000 polys) using large leaf sizes and different leaf textures, less branches, etc.

I'd suggest having better camera controls. I also noticed that some of the branches do not connect properly at the 2nd and 3rd levels to the branches before it.

The GPL license is a bit limiting - what are the chances of it being LGPL instead? I'd like to be able to port it to wxWidgets and include it as a plugin into my own editor and adding a bunch of features. Features that come to mind are the ability to have multiple leaf definitions and randomly choose between them to have varying leaves. Potentially generate billboard leaves similar to SpeedTree. Export to .obj format. Optionally allow the user to choose to not export certain levels of branches while still generating the leaves for those levels. Possibly look into fake poly branches similar to SpeedTree's "fronds". These are things I'd look into adding, but if not, are good suggestions for the MeshTree Studio you've created.

The license will prohibit me from doing this, unfortunately. I could modify your WinForms code but prefer to use a lot of the code from my own project, such as camera management. Alternatively I may have to go straight to Sputnik and ask whether his code can be LGPL and redo all the great work you've done here.

So anyhow, it does look great, and nice work!

Post by **Praetor** » Mon Nov 13, 2006 11:45 pm

Does have billboard leaves give you something better than just using a cross rect mesh? Seems like the cross version would be better anyway, to keep the leaves from unnaturally following you.

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 12:06 am

Falagard: Sputnick released MeshTree under GPL, and as far I'm concerned, I had to do the same. If MeshTree's license had been less limiting, I would have released it under less restrictive license. But, I'm not that much into law-things.

Anyway, thank you all very much for comments!

Preator: Billboarded leaves allow you to use smaller number of "leaves" getting even better results (of course not in all cases). I modified once MeshTree to do that.

BigHands · Post by **BigHands** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 1:11 am

I love the tool, but about half of the meshes I create cause a crash when Ogre shuts down in Direct3D mode. The crash has to do with freeing the mesh vertex buffers... Any ideas?

Post by **Falagard** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 1:16 am

Sputnick released MeshTree under GPL, and as far I'm concerned, I had to do the same.

Yup, in that case you have no choice. Perhaps I'll contact Sputnick and see if he's willing to release it under LGPL instead. I have no problem with a standalone editor like this being GPL usually, so perhaps I'll see about just pulling out some code from my editor for the pieces where necessary, it would just be more convenient to be able to include it directly as a tool plugin instead of pulling parts of my existing code out and putting it into something else.

Does have billboard leaves give you something better than just using a cross rect mesh? Seems like the cross version would be better anyway, to keep the leaves from unnaturally following you.

One word: SpeedTree.

Paulov · Post by **Paulov** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:13 pm

Hi

congrats for this tree editor, I think nice low-poly tree editors are one of the less available tools out there.

some coments:

I agree that camera movements should be improved.

By default the generated trees ar quite high-poly, I find easy to reduce the polycount generated by leaves, playing with their scale etc, but the polycount generated by the branches is hard to reduce, I think. Would be nice if there was an option that could make the branches be just planar, instead of so much detailed meshes.

I also realised that it is an scelent bush generator.. great!

For very dense trees or bushes the tree "structure" (branches etc) may not be necesary because it would be covered by the leaf density, in this cases would be nice to have a "virtual estructure" so that we can just export the leaves, saving some polys.

3ds exporter would be very nice, since some of us create content foor ogre via max using oFusion, and would prefer to have everything done inside max.

very nice interface

would be nice to see this tool evolutionate::

Pablo

Sputnick · Post by **Sputnick** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 8:27 pm

First of all, congrats for your editor.

I confirm that I will change the license to LGPL + BSD and include them in the next release. BTW, I'm not that familiar with open source licensing.

Finally, SpannerMan and I are also working on our editor for the MeshTree parameters based on a CEGUI interface. It's starting to look quite nice. We should be able to release a preversion pretty soon.
The editor is also helping me to correct a few bugs with some parameters in the MeshTree code. I'm looking forward to showing you the results.

A few more parameters will also be available.

- Sput

Post by **jacmoe** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 8:44 pm

Hi Sputnick!

WooHoo! Maybe I can still get the meshtree of my dreams for Christmas? ->
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ght=#51172

Awesome that you finally managed to get some Ogre time!

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 7:15 am

Sputnick: that's absolutely great! I just can't wait

Sputnick · Post by **Sputnick** » Fri Nov 17, 2006 9:49 pm

jacmoe wrote:WooHoo! Maybe I can still get the meshtree of my dreams for Christmas? ->
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ght=#51172

It was indeed very hard to save some time for Ogre this year. I hope that 2007 will be more quite.

- Sput

kneeride · Post by **kneeride** » Sat Dec 23, 2006 3:07 am

ah, i finally found this thread!! (I've been using the old editor vojtek87
wrote in june)

looks good vojtek87.

- all the shadow modes apart from texture modulative crashed on my machine. not sure if it is just me (i install a new graphics card recently)
- any change to get some better camera control? ie a right click and rotate/zoom

EDIT: oh yes, would it be possible to increment the seed on each generate click? It would be good to click through the seeds quickly.

vojtek87 · Post by **vojtek87** » Mon Dec 25, 2006 9:04 pm

kneeride:
- what do you mean by "crashed"? I've no idea what's wrong with them, did you launch Shadows Demo?
- I'm sorry to say that, but this project is no longer continued, at least now. Sorry, a lot of work, I hope you understand.
- If you want "fully" (time-dependent) random tree, set seed to -1.

Merry Christmas!

// edit: Wow! This project is on wiki along with the most fameous OGRE Tools, maybe I should continue it... :]
Happy new year everybody!

noFreak · Post by **noFreak** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:54 am

Hi @all,
do anybody know how i can disable the exporter to use "shared vertex"?