The Grove 6 features a streamlined workflow
Wybren van Keulen writes:
The Grove is growing by leaps and bounds, and today marks The Grove’s 6th release already!
Release 6 features a streamlined workflow, greatly improved conifers and lingering dead branches. It allows you to unleash your twigs with the automated twig picker, and to quickly match any preset to any twig size.
Pick and grow 40 improved and freshly added presets – and predictably tweak them to your liking. Now that the butterfly effect is mostly gone, the Grove feels more robust and more fun than ever before!
Highlighted features include:
- Automated twig and texture pickers do all the work for you.
- Scale any preset to work with any twig.
- Big improvements to conifers.
- Automatic smoothing of branches.
- Dead branches stick around.
- A big spring cleaning of old functionality!
This is a free update for existing users. New users can get The Grove with a 20% release discount until June 14th!
TheGrove seems like such an awesome piece of software, but being so specialized its hard for me to justify the price. Even with the handsome 20% discount, its nearly $130 CAD. I wish there was a lite version or a trial version.
Nobody does it better, so I can appreciate the price. Maybe one day I’ll cough it up and make my renders that much better!
If you’re freelancing, you can easily make that money back plus much more with one job.
What I find pretty weak for an addon that costs more than 100 € is that it is only written in Python, so it is very slow.
I would expect it to be accelerated with C, C++ or at least numpy (C internally), and for this price it should probably even be multithreaded.
The Grove definitely grows at an enjoyable speed, and Python is way faster than you must think. Several parts of The Grove do use numpy, which is indeed an awesome library!
There is a good reason for using Python. I focus on the quality of the trees first and foremost. If The Grove was coded in C, you wouldn’t have seen so many updates so fast.
Developing in Python is fast and agile. Once the trees are where they need to be and the codebase is less prone to changes, I will definitely focus on more performance.
I’ve always been happy with the speed. Works great on my PC build.
Good to hear, I want The Grove to be fun to use.
I’ve always been happy with the speed. Works great on my PC build.
Do you need to buy the new version when a new one comes out?
Updates are free! I value the early birds that made The Grove possible and I would rather sell some more twigs than have you running outdated software.
Thank you for the quick reply. I have another question… From what I read on your website, it is a tree/branch generator. Does it come with any twigs at all? The twigs are beautifully modeled and shaded , btw!
Hi! Twigs are optional purchases, because users from across the world have completely different trees surrounding them, and for instance a game artist will have no use for the highly detailed twigs we have on offer.
There is a set of simple example twigs available for free on the The Grove webpage: https://www.thegrove3d.com/learn/creating-and-using-twigs/
That helped me a lot understanding how to create my own twigs when necessary :)
It’s quite expensive (relatively speaking) but well worth it.
I’m seeing a lot of love given to those conifers in this update. And the Lombardy Poplars omg!!! Good job with a great attention to detail.
The latest update is indeed better than the last – I find the Grove to be somewhat frustrating though – there are tree presets (seeds) in version 4 and 5 that aren’t in v6, there are twigs that have no tree seeds available, tree seeds without any twigs available, and bark textures in the packages that don’t correspond to any available twig or tree seed. But for the tree types that have the tree, the twigs and the bark, The Grove makes wonderful trees!
Can The trees stand up to close up shots ( the bark especially. )
Will the Grove be compatible with Blender 2.8?