The Grove release 10a
The Grove 10a
While work continues steadfast on adding features and improving existing ones, here’s a quick intermediate update just to keep you growing in the new Blender 3.0.
There’s a welcome speed boost, and an introduction to the next generation of twigs. Apart from coding and researching I’ve been working on capturing a wide variety of new twigs with a capture technique that creates exceptionally fresh looking leaves. The “summer of twigs” has just ended and now it’s time to share the fruits.
Speed improvement
Fixes
- Animation playback in the wind animation operator caused a crash in recent Blender releases. This was an easy fix.
- A small change in the Python API of Blender 3.0 alpha would cause errors in the bend operator. This has been fixed.
- A math domain error could occur with certain extremes of parameters causing the growth power to be negative. Not anymore.
- And the last fix is for an especially annoying issue. After 7 years I finally found a surprisingly simple hack around a limitation in Blender’s UI. The Grove’s grow button is quite unique in that it’s probably the only button in Blender that you’d want to repeatedly click again and again without moving your mouse. This wouldn’t work because the button lost focus after running the simulation. To get the focus back, you’d have to either move the mouse or perform an extra click to make it work. I now fake the mouse movement within the code, so it now finally works like expected.
Summer of twigs
The setup can capture deeper greens and deeper gloss. It captures real surface normals, real translucency and real diffuse colors with all directional and reflected light filtered out. These twigs will work in whichever light you shine on them – they fit any scene like a chameleon. This works especially well on twigs with glossy leaves, it makes them come alive.
The new twigs are tagged lush, and lush is what they are. Taking advantage of the new twig options, many of the lush twigs include several variations of side and end twigs, and a separate upward oriented twig for even better results.