I thought some of you might find this free tool useful:

http://dryad.stanford.edu/index.php

This is from their web site:

Quote:

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Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or game. In Dryad, you create a tree by visually navigating to it through a design space: the space of all trees. This space has close to a hundred dimensions and Dryad lets you move around it as if it were a city map. To help you find your way, Dryads around the world communicate to share which trees were picked in the past. A collaborative mapping of the tree space emerges, which your Dryad uses to gently steer you towards high-quality finds. We call this collaborative design space exploration.

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It's a little slow, but it seems to be pretty functional. I have not exported any of the trees to OBJ yet, but will try to test it out soon.

thank you for sharing that. looks quite interesting, lets see

hm. it crashes here pretty fast when changing some parameters

and the export seems not always very useful , plenty of strange useless triangles are created

Never crashed for me, but I have not tested the OBJ export yet.

Just tested the OBJ export. It does fine (at least the OBJ file opens perfectly in my 3D applications). However, the trees are very, very polygon heavy. The one tree I exported was in the range of well over 200,000 polygons. The reason for this was all the leaves! Each leaf was modeled! The trunk and branches were low-poly, so they could be used.

hmm, i got quite a bunch of triangles along the branchs, which where not ment to be leaves.
the crash occures when i try to change the crown shape. however, when i first reduce the number of branches and leaves it works...

if focussing on the trunk/branches it offers some nice possibilities

unfortunately it doesn't work for me at all *cries*
but i do meet the minimum system requirements...

it doesn't work for me, crash at start