A ground-up approach to a 3D-printer-friendly tree generator, as a Blender addon.
Unlike most of the other (excellent) tree generators, LTG focuses on generating 3D-printable models using a combination of watertight meshes with additional attention to minimum thicknesses and branches directions. Currently the addon doesn't create a fully-functional tree: roots must be cropped manually and I'd recommend a general tree remeshing. The initial design of this generator aimed to a true bottom-up simulation, keeping all the design parameters as little emulative as possible, but currently the generation follows something in between: .ost of the rules are "local", there is no "tree shape" parameter and each branch is (almost) not aware of its position on the tree, but at the same time there are some global filters to keep the shapes printable.
As of the latest update the content of the plugin is not in a single .py file anymore. Download all the .py files, zip them and load that zip in Blender.
Once the plugin is installed, you should find yourself a tab "Create" on the properties panel on the right. You will likely be overwhelmed by the amount of parameters, which yet need to be organized in sections with brief tooltips or labels. Till then, keep the following pointers in mind:
- The plugin updates the tree every time a parameter change. This means that dragging a value causes multiple generations, resulting in a real-time movement.
- If the "Generate Mesh" is ticked, the tree will be generated with the whole mesh; otherwise, only the "graph" of the tree armature is shown. I'd recommend using the latter if you want to experiment with real-time parameters changes.
- The resulting mesh is composed of a separated watertight mesh for each branch section. Remeshing is always an option.
- The roots are programmed to grow until they get fully under Z = 0.
- The "Create Tree" button allows to recreate the tree even if no parameters have changed. It's wonky, and a better UX will be implemented.
Future versions of the script should implement several more features:
- Roots are not enough to justify the widening of the bottom of the trunk.
- Cropping the roots under the 0 axis should be done automatically, with special care to the potentially oerlapping vertices that this generates.
- Add general presets
- Group parameters in different sections each with a preset
- Implement a pruning logic, that adds a chance for thin branches to break over time depending on the weight on them and the number of iterations (If a branch is broken, the child branches won't be displayed)
- Implement a light searching logic. Without having to create specific leaves, it's reasonable to calculate a value of ambient occlusion for each branch and possibly a direction of maximum light to grow towards. If the parameter regulating that is set to maximum you'll end up with a more even distribution of branches. Also it should prevent branches touching or intersecting each other too much.
- [Major] Re-write the core logic in Rust for faster generation times. The speed for the Rust-Python interface might be an unacceptable overhead.
Check out the LICENSE.txt file. The TL;DR would be "use it for whatever, but not to sell models, please".