November 26, 2011, 08:32:30 pm
Yes, customising or importing is vital.
What is the story with those other programs? What options do we have?
It goes without saying the Speedtree road is kind of a narrow lane right now.
Sure, IDV has released Speedtree Studio (read Speedtree Lite) but that won't get you anywhere with Lumion since it requires you to have the full 5.1 SDK.
Expensive, by now outdated, and requires one to get a 'bill of rights' to have access to it at all since it's middleware, which also from a point of maintanance for the Lumion devs, can be a total disaster from time to time (have a look at the hotfixes required up till now and count the Speedtree ones....oh wait, that's 100% so you don't need to count anything)...
That said, Speedtree is ofcourse very cool. I'm still a huge fan, even though, ever since I started modeling foliage for CryEngine3, my bias towards it has changed a bit.
Ideally Lumion would have some kind of simplified solidgrowth-ish
implementation in the future. A couple of mainstream algorithms for Trees, bushes and flowers with the option to customize textures and sizes. If paired with a vertexshader for windsimulation and some kind of auto-sprite and mips config, the need for Speedtree as the sole format for Lumion foliage would quickly melt away. So, Treesketch with a twist so to speak.