Botanica
plants for your virtual world
Plant Creation
Botanica offers an easy, procedural, non-destructive way to create plant models. The strength of Botanica lies in its ability to assist users in creating variants of existing plants with minimal effort. Age, season, species, morphology – it is simple to produce and maintain variants of plants you already have. In some cases, it takes just one click; in others, it takes only a few minutes to create a new variant. Botanica is versatile – you can describe everything from grass and flowers to bushes and trees.
TECH ART APPROVED
The plant definitions are stored in easy-to-understand, human-readable XML files, making it simple to perform batch changes to your plant database. Botanica can be executed as a command-line tool, allowing for easy integration into automated pipelines. All models and preview images for your catalog can be regenerated at once with a single click.
Optimized Plant Models
Botanica assists with model simplification by offering a range of standard and some unique techniques. Generated models can vary from millions of triangles down to just two. Botanica’s strength lies in generating mid-range LODs with dozens or hundreds of triangles while maintaining minimal visual differences. For the roughest LODs, Botanica offers the generation of polyplanes, billboards, or impostors. The model can also be configured to generate a set of convex components to represent the geometry LOD for fast collisions.
Rendering Data
The lighting of vegetation is a challenging task—many kinds of data play a significant role in the final result, including albedo, translucency, roughness, and self-shadowing. Botanica is aware of this complexity and offers a full spectrum of data needed for PBR shaders, including a carefully calculated ambient occlusion map.
Proven Technology
Botanica is the solution for all plants in the Bohemia Interactive Simulations products VBS4 and VBS Blue IG. Over 200 plant species, over 600 variants, dense foliage. From blades of grass to the trunks of mighty spruce trees – all that is managed by Botanica.
