My first Vue 5 Infinite article!
I remember when i first for Vue 5 Infinite and in the feature set it said that you could make your own plant species. This sounded very interesting to me, but it didn’t seem very intuitive on how to get to the plant editor (thank god for the help book!) and start creating my very own plants. It was easy enough to figure out but I’m sure, as you’ll see here shortly, that i am only going to graze the surface of what this tool can do. This tutorial is intended for beginners.
First things first.
1. Load Vue 5 Infinite. Vue should load with a default scene.
2. In the left menu, single right-click on the tree icon.
3. You’ll see the collection of default plants. Plants, Alien Plants, Edited Plants, and Personal Plants.
4. Click Personal Plants.
5. Now click New Collection (its the little icon all the way at the bottom and to the left of the Collections window.
6. Its going to prompt you for 2 things. The first is what folder on your hard drive you want to store the collection. I chose the Plants folder in the Vue 5 Infinite folder. Click ok. The second prompt is the New Collection -> Indicate the name of this collection. I called my new collection Robs Plants.
Creating a new collection isn’t necessary to edit plants, but it will allow you to be more organized with how you save your plants.
Let’s get to editing a plant now for god’s sakes!
The “Please select a plant species” window should still be opened.
1. Click Plants.
2. Choose a plant to edit. I chose the Mexican Palm Tree.
3. Double-left click the plant. This drops an instance of the plant into your scene. Cool — we have a plant.
4. Now with the Tree selected, right click the tree and left click “Edit Object”.
5. TADA! The Plant Editor is loaded. Here’s where things start to get interesting.
6. At this time, pause for a minute and mouseover over all of the options at the top of this window. Those options up there are things like Render Preview, Render Options, New Plant, Save Plant, Response to Wind, etc…
7. It is also important to note that this plant is split into main sections, Trunks/Branches and Leaves/Petals. The Trunks/Branches is split into two subsets, Trunks and Stems. Leaves/Petals only has 1 subset. When modify the Trunks/Stems you can change both subsets at the same time or you can make changes to only the Trunk or only the Stems. I’m sure you’ll find this very usual to achieve better effects.
When you first load up the editor you’ll see at the top left of the window the names of the two subsets and then below that a drop down menu with “All Subsets” selected. This means if you want to modify something you can change both of these items at the same time or you can edit the branch by itself and the trunk by itself too. This offers some really good control and you’ll see you can pretty much make any type of plan in existance or fantasy.
I will be back sometime in the near future to show you some of the wild plants I’ve created with the Plant Editor. In the meantime, try experimenting with the settings and create your very own new plant. Post a comment on my blog below with a link to the image, I’d love to see what you all are creating out there.
Until next time…