Wybren van Keulen writes:
Say hello to The Grove 8! I can't believe it's been 5 years already - 5 years of relentlessly solving the puzzle of tree growth...
This new release, The Grove 8, fills connects the dots and greatly amplifies what was already in place. In addition to fundamental changes to the growth algorithm, there are some big new features to play with. For the first time, we can watch natural tree growth in mere minutes, bringing seemingly inanimate organisms to life! Just flip on Record and start growing. The Grove will save your growing tree to a sequence of year-by-year objects, fluently interpolated with shape keys.
Environment reaction got a big boost, you can now use separate objects for attracting, deflecting, blocking or shading new growth.
These are just some of the dozens of features and improvements to this release. As always the release notes will let you in on the journey of discovery. Read all about the new features here.
To celebrate 5 years of growth, you can now get The Grove with a 20% discount, which ends November 10th.
7 Comments
Bought v7 a year ago, now this new update is free, so a happy day for me. Looks good!
Happy days :) I hope you'll have fun growing with all the new features!
Looks like it's time to update the last question on the FAQ. :)
Judging from the animations, it looks to me that tree growth remains evergreen, though I imagine one might be able to change the material to allow you to slide from green through to red, and then brown. One next big thing might be semi-procedural textures, as well as procedural flowers so you can have buds, blooms, and animations for everywhere in between.
Now that this system is in place, I can't wait to experiment more. You could probably already do this by simply animating the twig models.
Good point, I just updated it! Also it's so refreshing to see someone read the entire FAQ! Thank you for that.
Does it work on linux?