Kraut Beta 3

A binary release of the (currently) latest development status.

New Features

• Material Library
• Per-Vertex Ambient Occlusion baking
• Dockable UI panels
• Forces to influence the tree (e.g. magnets)
• More rendering modes and skylight
• Umbrella branch type mode

Kraut Beta 2

This is a re-release on GitHub of the very old Kraut Beta 2.

New Features in BETA 2

• Flares along branches: deform the mesh to imitate strong roots or bulges.
• Billboard Leaves: Leaves that rotate towards the viewer to achive more densly looking trees with few polygons.
• Frond and Leaf color variation: More natural looking trees through easy to use color variation per leaf.
• Convert to DDS: All textures that are exported as TGA can now additionally be converted to DDS format.
• LeafCards: Top-Down mode to create leaf textures for billboards.
• Visual Tree Component Editor: Much improved UI for editing tree components and reusing them in other trees.
• Generally much cleaned up UI. Added progress bars for longer operations.
• Fixed broken FBX export.
• Improved smooth vertex normals.
• Several improvements to the tree generation. Branch width is now absolute, Trunk types can be spwaned with more control.
• Added Billboard and Impostor LOD types.
• Export to custom format, which supports all the features that are required to fully render a Kraut tree.
• Added program "Kraut Viewer" with full source, which demonstrates how to load and render a kraut tree.

General Feature Set

• Procedural growth of branches and fronds.
• Easily create thousands of variations from the same tree specification.
• Interactive WYSIWYG editor.
• Undo / Redo system.
• Export Meshes to OBJ, FBX or custom format.
• "Leafcard" mode to easily create textures which can be used to represent entire branches. This enables you to create highly detailed looking * trees without many polygons.
• Exported leafcard textures are automatically processed to be well suited for mipmap creation.
• Automatic computation of up to five level-of-detail meshes with much reduced polygon counts.
• LODs include Impostor and Billboard mode.
• Many tweakable options to get the best quality out of level-of-detail meshes.
• Manual editing mode that allows to easily paint unique branches exactly as desired.
• On manually created branches additional procedural branches may be grown.
• "Physical Simulation" mode: Branches will try to grow around obstacles, such as other branches or additional objects that can be loaded from * OBJ files. This allows to create a tree that shall fit perfectly into some corner of a game level.
• Several sample trees and sample leafcards included.