Forest Tools

Forest Tools, an Utility plugin, is used to group some tasks that cannot be done directly from the Modify panel of Forest.

Instanciate

Convert the trees of the SELECTED Forest object to instances.

Objects

Individual objects

Create instances as stand-alone objects.

Create group

When enabled, group all instances created in a group object. Be care: 3DS may be very slow handling a huge number of objects in a group, most of times is better to put them as non grouped objects in a separate layer (next option).

Move to layer

Create a new layer and move the instances to it. The "Freeze" and "Boxes" checkboxes allows to create the layer as freezed and display all objects as boxes.

Auto delete old items

With this option enabled, Forest Tools searches and deletes old instances before creating new objects. Use '"Delete" button to remove the instances manually. This only works if the objects have not been renamed (including the own Forest object).

Geometry List

Disable at end

When the instances are created, we don't need anymore the trees created by the Forest object in the scene. To hide them, Forest Tools set the elements of the Geometry List to "Disabled". So, if you would like to recover the Forest mesh, set the Geometry back to "Custom Object". If this checkbox is disabled, Forest Tools doesn't modify the Geometry List.

Enable before start

Sets the Geometry to "Custom Mesh" automatically before creating the instanced objects.

Enable

Used to set the "Custom Mesh" mode in the Geometry List manually (of the selected Forest object).

If you don't get the desired result with the instanced objects, and want to adjust some parameter in Forest, it's easy:

• Delete the instances using "Delete" button
• Select the Forest object
• Click the enable button
• Adjust your Forest parameters
• When ready, click the Instanciate button

Material Optimizer

Runs the Material Optimizer for the selected Forest objects. See Materials for more information about this tool.

Installation

To use Forest Tools, add it to the Utilities Max panel, as shown in the image.