Arbaro

Landscape design on a computer now benefits from quite the variety of applications, which can simulate, and display objects in a photorealistic style. Video games make no exception here, with beautiful, and heavily detailed environment created by artists. With the same idea in mind, Arbaro makes it easy to create trees by tweaking various aspects, and exporting them as 3D objects.

A great advantage is that it doesn’t really depend on a specific operating system type to function, and can run on any device which has Java Runtime Environment installed. Moreover, the application itself can run without going through a setup process, thus not making any changes to system registry entries.

There’s a default generated tree shown in wireframe, with two panels for side, and top-down view. An additional panel shows detailed descriptions in the form of pictures for almost every property item you select, just so you know how this affects the end result.

Properties are all found in a side panel, with a tree list showing components, while selection unveils corresponding sets of options. These affect general areas like tree shape, trunk radius, leaves, as well as multiple levels of branches. To help out, every function is fitted with descriptions, and examples where necessary.

Although you don’t interact with the shape directly, values you modify generate real time preview. Values are more or less tied to the shape of the tree. Selected from a drop-down menu, this can be conical, spherical, hemispherical, cylindrical, tapered cylindrical, flame, inverse conical, and a few more.

It’s a good idea to pay a visit to the options menu as well in order to configure rendering options, output path, as well as default export format, which can be Wavefront OBJ, AutoCAD DXF, as well as Povray primitives or meshes.

Rendering can be used to generate a PNG picture of the object with full details, with configurable picture width, and height values. As for export, the format can be selected, path, whether to include stems and leaves UV coordinates, as well as the possibility to create a POV scene.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Arbaro comes with a great deal of flexibility, and a surprisingly thorough set of details for creating tree objects. The overall process is intuitive enough to make accommodation easy even to inexperienced individuals. Export options generate files you can later on use in more complex projects.