Tree, landscape, hair, Instancing and dynamics!

[BazC]

I've already mentioned this suite of plugins in another thread but I've just heard back from the developer and he's interested in porting to Lightwave so I wanted to make this a little more high profile!

Samir Kharchi (www.Katachi.de) produces a suite of plugins for Cinema 4d called DP Instant Tree (DPIT) It started as a plant generator and has developed into an excellent tree and plant generator, grass generator, procedural landscape generator, shader suite, Dynamics system, Volumetric instancing and now he's adding a hair and fur system. All this and more for €300! I've played with the demo for Cinema and it's an excellent set of tools, complex and sophisticated but fairly easy to use (a lot easier than x-frog for instance!)

I emailed the developer today about the possibility of a port to Lightwave and this was his reply:

"I had already lots of inquiries asking to port DPIT to MAX, SoftImage and Lightwave. I also had a look at the Lightwave SDK. It still seems to
be too limited for what DPIT does and furthermore the LW developer support doesn´t seem to be the best either (beside the fact that I need to own
LW in order to create Plugins, which is pretty destructive).

However, I will have a look at the LW9 SDK once it is released. And if DPIT is applicable, I am sure I will find a way to port DPIT
to LW. Of course, this also only happens if there is enough feedback from the LW community, once I am asking for it."

DPIT homepage (http://www.dpit2.de/)

DPIT hair video (early days still!) (http://www.dpit2.de/download/dpit_hair.avi)

[RedBull]

Not to take from the idea... But..

Lightwave does have a multitude to tree plugins, TreeDruid, Trees & Bolts,
Treecage, Treegen to name but a few.... Some being free...
pawel olas plugins, are good and cheap....

Also the currently bundled version of Vue5, is not all bad....
Terragen does terrains (as does LW really) too.
Instancing is done in LW by HD-Instance, and Hair is done by Sas and Saslite.

I'm sure it's cool, but the problem i see being LW's SDK... :)

The effort required to get a volumetric instancer programmed, in Lightwave
is no small effort.. Graham had to write and rewrite all of LW raytracing stuff
manually, to get a lot to work.... Ditto for people like Worley..
Hence the reason, for the price of those plugins.

I'm not sure about the C4D SDK, but i imagine he might well have some troubles, in porting to LW..... But we can always hope!

[BazC]

You're absolutely right! Lightwave doesn't have any shortage of tree plugs but this is a REALLY good one, on a par with X-Frog but easier to use I'd say. It's capable of generating flowers, palms, ferns etc. In Cinema the model stays parametric, so you can edit it at any time. I don't know if this would be possible in Lightwave but maybe some time in the future! There is much more to this plug too! Landscape generation within Lightwave for instance, yes I know you can do this to a degree now but this has erosion algorythms etc which don't exist in Lightwave as far as I know. None of it would be new to Lightwave but to have all these tools in one very affordable package would be a big plus in my opinion. Having an alternative to Sasquatch/Saslite and HDInstance wouldn't hurt either, especially as DPIT hair would be polygonal!

Again you're right about the SDK, the developer has already informed me that the current SDK is too restrictive to port this plug but LW9 SDK is supposed to be much more open! Hopefully that would allow this to work. :)

Thanks for the feedback! - Baz