Plant Factory?

[Paulsw2]

Plant Factory? 'Imposters'? What's going on? Should I send all my SpeedTrees off for wood-chipping now?

https://forums.auran.com/threads/trainz-plus-beta-plant-factory-support-129876.180923/

 

[pware]

Should I send all my SpeedTrees off for wood-chipping now?

Not yet (but I would expect that Trainz will continue to support SpeedTrees as a "legacy" asset) as Plant Factory assets are still very much in the beta testing stage and are only available in the current Trainz Plus beta release.

 

[BBarnes005]

It's a change that has been needed to happen for a while. It is no longer possible to acquire the version of the SpeedTrees program needed for Trainz, and even if it were possible, the price of the license required for said program is far beyond the reach of most of this community's content creators.

Meanwhile, the program for Plant Factory is both open source and free, making it far more accessible to a larger part of the community and allowing N3V to customize it to suit their needs. Overall, an improvement all around as it'll finally allow us to get new trees and vegetation in this game.

 

[wreeder]

Plant Factory is free software (but not open source) made by a company called e-onsoftware. It produces plain old 3D polygon trees, bushes and plants. Therefore Trainz will no longer be dependent on a third party library like SpeedTrees. The power of PF is in the tools that it has available to the creator. You can use the program to very quickly create realistic low poly plants and the program can then create all the LODs and even a unlimited number of variants by changing the height and shape of the branches. Plant Factory plants can be used in TRS22 SP5 as well as Trainz Plus. They are trainz build 5.6.

The imposter system is a new and different system that works by automatically replacing 3D trees with 2D billboard trees that are created on the fly by the system. These 2D trees are designed to always present the face of the asset to the player's POV. The 3D to 2D transition is designed to take place at a certain distance from the camera so the player doesn't really notice when it happens. It works with almost any 3D tree currently available for Trainz or at least that is the plan.

N3V released a new test build of Trainz Plus yesterday that shows amazing progress with the Imposter system features working much better than the first test build.

 

[wreeder]

Apparently, I'm the only one that has found it so far.

Thread 'Trainz Plus Beta Plant Factory support 129876'

Apr 16, 2025

Hello Everyone,

This build includes several fixes to the imposter system, the main one everyone should notice is the fix to camera facing imposters which will stop trees appearing to "disappear". This build also has a fix applied specifically for AMD GPU card users, which resulted in trees missing leaves. If you have an AMD graphics card, please test this build out and report if any trees look incorrect.

Please review old foliage assets that and report any that may render incorrectly. In addition, try out some of the new Plant Factory assets. Three Plant Factory assets have been prepared...

• n3v_laurence
• Replies: 10
• Forum: TRS22 & Trainz Plus Beta

• 

 

[JCitron]

These 2D trees are designed to always present the face of the asset to the player's POV.

The technology is quite old. Animatek, later Digital Element was using this in World Builder where they called them flipboards. The transition in that program was almost seamless. There was an option to render just flipboards which was great for proof rendering.

 

[wreeder]

Yep, even the train sim that must not be named had a version of the imposter system many years ago.

 

[pware]

Apparently, I'm the only one that has found it so far.

Nope, got it yesterday.

 

[Paulsw2]

Thanks for the responses everyone - I'll keep the lumberjacks at bay for the time being then as far as the speedtrees are concerned!

The technology is quite old. Animatek, later Digital Element was using this in World Builder where they called them flipboards. The transition in that program was almost seamless. There was an option to render just flipboards which was great for proof rendering.

That's interesting John. Didn't Jankvis have a go at this with some tree assets in Trainz some years ago?

 

[JCitron]

Thanks for the responses everyone - I'll keep the lumberjacks at bay for the time being then as far as the speedtrees are concerned!

That's interesting John. Didn't Jankvis have a go at this with some tree assets in Trainz some years ago?

Yes, Jan did. He did some assets with it and told N3V about it and now we have the technology in our hands for tree development so we can move away from Speed Trees which as we know have been nothing but annoying and troublesome. My hope is people will use this and create realistically-looking and sized trees rather than the monsters we have now.