Hothouse 3D

Hothouse 3D is a system for creating, storing and organizing 3D models for a wide variety of plants, shrubs and trees. Each Hothouse spece can spawn myriad plant variations, each with diffuse, bump, normal and specular maps. The spece editor gives real time feed back so that a representative plant model can be viewed at every stage as it is moulded into shape. Multiple seasonal texture maps may be applied for generating plants with foliage appropiate to any time of the year. Full control over the required level of detail enables models containing from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of triangles to be saved to a standard .obj or .3ds file.

See the download page for system requirements and installation.

Simple 3D Plant Spece Design

The complexity of plants and trees and the limitless variations found within even a single spece poses a significant challenge for 3D designers that has been addressed by a variety of tree generation algorithms. Typical of these are a preponderance of abstract parameters whose meaning and visual impact can be difficult to immediately understand. Hothouse 3D takes one system - described in Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees, by Jason Weber and Joseph Penn - and organises the stems and leaves of a plant spece and their textures into an easily viewed hierarchy. Each level of the hierarchy - trunk, stem, leaf etc. - presents its relevant properties and can display a 3D preview 'sprig' which renders in real time as property sliders are moved. Forming the overall structure of a spece is a matter of working up the hierarchy and developing the required appearance at each level; a process that Hothouse attempts to make as easy as possible. To capture the differences of plants within a spece, most of the parameter sliders also have side bars which indicate the range over which random plant to plant variations of a spece can occur.

Once a spece has been designed and a particular plant has been generated it is either sent to your graphics card (within Hothouse) or rendering software (via an export file) as a series of triangles. The number of triangles produced depends on such things as the bumpiness of the bark and leaves, the distance from the camera at which the plant is rendered, the size of the screen onto which it is being rendered, the curvature of the stems, and the required quality of the resulting render. Hothouse provides complete control over all these things through its Level of Detail mechanism which is based on the tesselation algorithm outlined in Efficient Bounded Adaptive Tessellation of Displacement Maps, by Kevin Moule and Michael D. McCool.