Plant Factory is a plant making tool by E-on Software that allows artists to create plants of all kinds from the smallest grass to the biggest oak trees and everything in between. It uses a node based system for generating plants as well as some innovative ways of controlling the shape of your plant in the viewport. It integrates with E-on’s Vue software but can also be used to export plants to your favorite 3D package complete with a full rig if you so desire. First Impressions When I first saw the videos of Plant Factory I was immediately intrigued by its workflow which seemed to blend both a procedural and a very artist friendly approach to making any kind of tree or plant – complete with wind animation. The first thing I noticed when opening the software was that it comes with very few examples and barely none of them are very common except for perhaps the palm tree. There is a section when you load a plant that at first glance looks like an ordinary category but when you click on it, it points you to buying plants which almost reminded me of micro-transactions in “free-to-play” games. The prices at writing vary from around $15 to $50 so they aren’t what I would call cheap but that would depend on how much your time is worth.

It was a bit disappointing to see but I was still excited about the interface and how you go about creating trees. The best war games for mac. Distributing your plants First I want to get a fairly hotly debated topic surrounding Plant Factory out of the way as it may or may not affect your purchasing decision. Applet in java.

I’ll spare you most of the story but let’s just say that when Plant Factory was initially launched, there were severe limitations on how you could distribute your source or exported plants to other people. This caused quite a stir and E-on has mostly addressed this with the latest version, 2014.6, but there are still some limitations. The rules now are that you are allowed to sell your plants but it must also be available on E-on’s Cornucopia website where they sell additional plants. It can also not be sold at more than 1.5x the price you sell it at elsewhere and you must specify in the filename that it was created with Plant Factory. In fact, the filename must start with “PlantFactory” and in the file’s description you must include “Created using E-on Software PlantFactory”. This applies to exported meshes as well but the source Plant Factory file must be available on Cornucopia – meaning people who buy the Plant Factory file can change your nodes as they see fit and you have no say in it. You can’t just sell or give away the exported mesh.

Factory Floor Plans and Plant Layouts Online and For Download Make a clear, easy-to-read factory layouts anf facility plans in minutes on any device. SmartDraw makes it easy. This is a multiple –user operated ActiveX Integration application that offers a number of working feature for your factory or plant. The application is operated through data and offers a complete solution to all your plant design and factory layout issues.

The EULA also specifically mentions static meshes, you are not allowed to sell or give away animated meshes. All this applies even if you just want to give your Plant Factory plant to a friend.

You have to go through Cornucopia in that case as well, although it’s integrated as an option within Plant Factory. Whether this sounds like a big deal to you or not I’ll leave to each individual reading this review.

(Note: more information regarding plant distribution limitations can be found on ) Creating plants You can go about creating trees in three different ways in Plant Factory. The first option you have is to just load a preset and use random seeds to generate variations of the plant very quickly – but as I mentioned there are very few presets that come with the software.

You can load a preset and fairly easily modify it to get it to look like the plant you’re after. The few presets that do exist do cover the different types of plants, like flowers, bushes and trees. The second option is similar, but instead of just loading the preset you get to draw the plant in the viewport. Say you want a palm tree that bends out over a beach, you have full control of the curvature of the main stem as you draw it out in the viewport while all the palm leaves will populate themselves automatically according to the rules set up in the preset. You also have the choice to draw out the leaves yourself from the stem and modify their orientation in the viewport. In both the first and second option you can modify its node graph to easily adjust its settings. There’s also a tool called “Prune” that lets you manually cut off specific branches in the viewport making you feel like a digital gardener.