Best of all, with the plug-in versions of Xfrog 4, most XFR files can be imported either as ready-to-render meshes or ready-to-customise Xfrog objects. Each high-quality XFR model is a botanically correct labour of love and comes complete with digitised images of actual leaves, petals and bark. These are divided into categories such as European and American Trees, Groundcover and Flowers, each containing 20 different species represented in three or more different varieties or different stages of growth. By comparison, other options, such as Vue Professional (see issue 113, p94), with its SolidGrowth technology, let you generate a variation on a preset plant species in just a couple of clicks.Īlthough Xfrog does offer similar convenience, you’ll have to buy one of the 16 XfrogPlants libraries in order to take advantage of it. If you just want to drop a believable tree or flower into your scene, you’re talking about a huge amount of work to build it up from scratch.

(Just an opinion - obviously.) So, that kind of rules out OnyxTree for anything but private picture-making purposes, anyhow.Whether standalone or plug-in, Xfrog provides the most powerful dedicated organic modelling available, but there’s still one major drawback.

A very tight set of restrictions on what you can do, should you succeed in making a good tree.) Given the dearth of trees, shrubs and other plants, if any of us get something we like, we should be giving away or selling the end results to others so that we can increase the plant population as much as possible.

(Not share with friends, not give away, not re-sell. OnyxTree is good, but you cannot distribute your results to anyone for any reason. Other than that it seems to make superb trees and shrubs (another neglected category of plant). The primary difference between Xfrog Lite and the regular version is that you can't animate your trees in the Lite version. Then you can make almost anything you can think of. If you acquire Xfrog 3.02, you can upgrade to 3.5 LITE for about $90 USD plus shipping. Xfrog 3.02(the free CD version) will do the job for most things.

Basically, I think it does not run under Win2000. Never could get it running, and no reasonable support, although a lot of conversation with the author. I had nothing but problems with Treemaker.

Xfrog 3.5 rapidshare