ZBrushCentral

ZTree Plugin

Shared ZScripts & Macros
#121

I think you have made a wonderful plugin and appreciate all your efforts and explanations. I am just starting to work through your ZTree tutorials and have begun experimenting with your beautiful fibermesh leaves. They render beautifully in ZBrush itself, but when I tried to render in Keyshot – they show up as cards, which makes sense. I tried to “render BPR as mesh”, but that didn’t help. I’m happy to keep my renders in ZBrush-- where it all works fine, but I am curious if you know of a work around for making this work in Keyshot as well?
Again, it is quite an achievement what you have given to the community here!

:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:

#122

Hey ArtBot, thanks for playing with this … I think when you get to understand it , the plugin is not very complicated to use. The L-System button can produce interesting structures with no effort…
About the transparency in keyshot, I think the keyshot material has Transparency texture slot , you could copy the same one used for the color or modify it to a black and white alpha texture.Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to try the bridge yet. I think I still have the original PSDs with a transparent background somewhere in my Messy HD…
Also, I am planning to make a little collection with nanomesh tools for leaves and trunk textures…
And finally… I made a little plugin to grow “ivy” on top of a mesh. it’s very very slow but it works for me. It has the advantage that you can use masks to guide where you want it . Not sure if it’s something people would be interested but I am still playing with it and adding things…

Edit: Oh, I and I forgot to mention something… The Trees don’t necessarily grow upside down… Everything else is upside down in the Zbrush world.
Don’t believe me? Try to see the coordinates at the position Sliders in the Tool:Geometry Subpalette… move the Y towards the negative side and see where your mesh goes. Or try to look closely to the transpose line coordinates. Negative is UP!
But hey, who said that negative can’t mean UP and positive DOWN?

You can work in any direction! and use rotation and flip under the deformation panel later

Also there is a vertical slider, want to grow in the other direction? move it all the way to 180 degrees. the only difference is that the antigravity will act as gravity…

#123

All that sounds interesting! I especially like the idea of trunk bark nanomesh and ivy sounds very useful too. I could care less about starting upside down, no biggie. I see there is a new Patch2 for 4R7 and I will start testing it this weekend. I was having some crashes in ZTree and this may solve that. Also, I may have the help files in the wrong place because I wasn’t getting that to work. But since I have all your videos to refer to, I think I will be able to figure most things out through them.

Since you are doing all this work and research, you may be interested in one of the greatest design books I have ever come across–and thanks to the Web, it’s free: Guide for drawing the acanthus, and every description of ornamental foliage;
by Page, James, designer-- https://archive.org/details/guidefordrawinga00pagerich
It is a treasure, and very readable considering it is a reprint (1886!) and everything is beautifully rendered. I have a feeling you will get a lot out of it. I saved it out as a PDF and now have it even on my phone!

PS. I also appreciate your Fibermesh branches. Building up a lot of layers using your variations makes for some beautiful results. At some point ZTree should be included with ZBrush, it is great!

#124

First! thanks for sharing that link for that beautiful Book. It’s so amazing!

The help button didn’t work? ! :frowning:

Did you install the version I shared with dropbox? ZTree.zip

The file was too big to upload here to ZBrush central because it contains the help files, they are just 6 jpgs with short descriptions of every button … if that, doesn’t work , you can just look at them, they should be inside the ZTtree data folder.

I am sorry you were experimenting crashes… I don’t know why that would happen, I didn’t have that problem. I found that sometimes the adaptive Skin wasn’t working right in R7 but they just fixed that problem.

#125

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#126

Yes, it probably is the Adaptive Skin being the problem. Thanks.

#127

Just wanted to say thanks for this plugin Dargelos. I’m looking into speed tree or this plugin. whatever helps me building easier. I like the control you get with z spheres and this plugin speeds up the process. Simply amazing.

I wanted to let you know I am a bit late at finding this plugin. I was looking through the video tutorials and noticed that I didn’t have the latest version. If you could post the latest version on the first or main page of this forum that would be great for others after me to get the latest version of your awesome plugin. Thanks again

#128

Thanks for the kind words and for giving this a try…

I can’t really edit the Post. I know it can be confusing right now… The last version can be downloaded from my dropbox linkor from my GumRoad.The Gumroad is free and has some examples and some Ztools ready to use as slots for L-sys or as Copy / paste branches. I also Included the Leaves Fibermesh presets in the ZIP file.

#129

Hey guys, Am I the only one having trees growing upside down ? x)
I came here to find an update but it doesn’t seem to make a difference; is there any trick I’m not aware of ?

Ztree_bug.png

Attachments

Ztree_bug.png

#130

Hi Tetsuo… if you simply set the vertical angle slider to 180 and click start it will go Up but this won’t work with the auto trees. Notice that, at any time, you can go to deformation and mirror in the Y axis or X/Y axis and fix it…
The main reason I decided to set the default vertical angle to 0 was because I wanted to consider positive coordinates in the Y axis to be Up.( in ZBrush Y negative is up) and because this way the attraction force that I made (that I called antigravity just because I am a freak and I didn’t want to sound pretentious by calling it phototropism ) goes in the right direction. If you grow the tree in the opposite direction ( vertical slider 180 ) the Attraction force will act like a sort of gravity force. This can be what you want but by default is the opposite.

So, again, the solutions are pretty simply :
1- work with the tree like it is and mirror Y when you are finished or after you make the adaptive skin.
2- start with an angle of 180 in the vertical slider but this will make the attraction force , if enabled, to behave like gravity.

I got this question several times so I will probably just flip the coordinates and update the Plugin soon.

#131

Tetsuo, I just changed the default vertical orientation to 180 so now the trees will grow UP by default. (bear in mind that the vertical angle slider can be changed to any desired inclination ). I also changed the direction of the attraction force and the Auto trees . Finally I fixed that weird alignment of the first two buttons that were set to be of a fixed size and not relative to the width of the sub-palette, they should look better now.
Try to download it again…

#132

This is really a beautiful plugin. I’ve only started playing with it: ZB 4R7 64 bit, Mac OSX 10.11.5. I tried doing an auto-conifer, made adaptive and deleted loops. It is consistently crashing on delete loops. Any suggestions? Thank you.

#133

I added Delete loops to the plugin UI only for covenience. It should be the same as going
to the tool:geometry:loops delete loops… Try to use it from there and if still crashes it’s a Zbrush problem.

#134

Thank you for responding. It does indeed crash on using Delete Loops in the Geometry panel as well. I will have to see if there is some other way to achieve this…possibly remeshing with a lower count. In one of the videos, it advises to have GroupSwitch ON before deleting loops. Is this a ZTree function or ZBrush?

#135

I searched the forums and see it is a known bug on Macs. Last word was late last year, which was same as earlier that year, that the Devs are aware of the problem. I’ll submit a ticket at least to confirm it’s still there with 4R7 P3.

#136

It might be a little bit tedious but you could delete loops with ZModeler . I like using delete loops because you can reduce the polycount drastically…
Yes, The Group Switch is also part of ZBrush.

#137

Great plugin! dargelos , thank you! I`ve used it to create few tree basemeshes and it helps alot. I wish this was integrated into Zbrush by default.

#138

Thanks a lot for the plugin! But I have one problem with one. When I click L-sys buttom appears an error2016-09-11_13-26-32.png
How i can solve this problem?

#139

you need at least one segment( 2 zspheres) to use L-Sys. So, go to segments , set it to 1 and press start, then try to use the l-sys.

#140

Go to the minute 2:22 in this video. <iframe width=“560” height=“315” src=“https://www.youtube.com/embed/CjEK8f7oDGs” frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen