Need help with plants in IRender nXt

Hi,

I'm using SU8 on Win 7 64-bit machine, and am experimenting with plants for the first time. Ran into some problems yesterday, so made sure I had the latest versions of IRender (KC23), library, and tree maker installed. Still have the same problems today.

If I open nXt Plant/ Rp TreeMaker and choose "load from library", there are unfortunately no palms. If I go to "Create Rp TreeMaker Plant", all's well, except that I have "File", "Raytrace", and "View", but not the "Type" that's shown in the video tutorial. Without that, I apparently can't make any type of palm! Working in Southern California, and in high-fire-hazard country to boot, having no palms renders this feature quite worthless. Is there a way to get that back? Or to download an earlier version that still had the palms?

I've experimented with the "Load AccuRender AR3 Plant from library", which has a great variety of plant material that's useful to me, but the quality is nowhere near that of the TreeMaker plants.

For what it's worth, the other odd thing about AR3 plants is that after placing them, they don't cast shadows in SU, and they disappear when rendered. I've discovered that even though the component is set to cast shadows, the two images within the component aren't. I've also discovered that I need to explode the component and then remake it before it will show in a render. Both of those issues are easily enough fixed, but odd.

Any hope of getting palms in TreeMaker???

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on March 29, 2011 at 1:32pm

The Palms can be located here, under File/New:

It was different in the Plant Editor when the tutorial was made. There was a Type menu choice back then.

Note: Don't try to use Groundcover here for making tree or plant components.

I'll have to try the AR3 plants again. I haven't used them in a while.

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Permalink Reply by Alain Bonnefoy on March 29, 2011 at 2:34pm

And then, click on "create image" or something like that in the lower right corner of the tree editor.

Don't worry, if the displayed tree is not the one you choosed by "file new", it will be refreshed correctly when you will adjust some parameters, as far as I remember.

hmm well and if you have time Rich, make sure you can render it because I did have chance to do it, especially with palms.

iRender Crashes with trees

;)

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hausz on March 29, 2011 at 5:04pm

Thanks much, Rich! Just when I think I've tried everything, it's always the obvious - like check everything in the drop downs! Not too hard to find! I played around a bit with "complex", which is mind-boggling! It sure would be nice if there was something in between the AR3 plants and TreeMaker, i.e., things like Joshua Trees and Sago Palms that you find in AR3, with the ability to fine-tune them with sliders as in TreeMaker.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hausz on March 29, 2011 at 5:35pm

Any guidance on tree height? If I make a palm with the default trunk length of "100", the trunk actually measures around 28' in the model. I see that the unit for leaves is mm, but it doesn't seem that my confusion with tree height has to do with metric conversion.....or does it?

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hausz on March 29, 2011 at 6:52pm

OK, answered my own question! Didn't notice the height indicator at the bottom of the window, and have figured out that the height indicated represents the total height of trunk and foliage in meters. Don't suppose there's any way of changing that to Imperial, is there?

Also, found that there are lots of different leaves in the Accurender library, but they're all rectangles. Any reason I can't use those as the basis for additional leaves in TreeMaker?

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Permalink Reply by Alain Bonnefoy on March 30, 2011 at 12:26am

Steve Hausz said:

Don't suppose there's any way of changing that to Imperial, is there?

Imperial... hum, maybe it's time to choose SI. ;)

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on March 30, 2011 at 8:17am

Here are three Palm trees supplied by "akinlolu olugboji" on the nXt for AutoCAD forum.

If you place these in one of the folders in the nXt_Plants library, you can use them as library plants.

Attachments:

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Permalink Reply by Cosmic Rocket on August 30, 2013 at 2:23am

Hey guys, where is the best place to download ArPlant files?

I have just switched to Flamingo nXt which uses this format and am struggling to find a decent database of plants which is frustrating because Flamingo 2 had a decent built in library.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on August 30, 2013 at 10:06am

Could you post this on the Flamingo nXt forum?

http://nxt.flamingo3d.com/forum

Perhaps they can point you to the download.

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Permalink Reply by Cosmic Rocket on August 30, 2013 at 10:10am

Ok, will do. However I think the filetype is cross-platform so if anyone on any forum knows where to find them I would appreciate it.

Cheers.

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hart on August 30, 2013 at 11:08am

Right, but our install puts something in the registry so that our SketchUp and Revit plugins will find the plants, to populate the selection dialog. Hopefully the Flamingo install does something similar.