The summer update for PlantCatalog is out. Create your own heathland sceneries with some of the most spectacular heathland plants out there. 16 new species give you plenty of content for your projects. All 16 species have more than 1700 presets combined in just the HD versions!
Read on to find out about all that's new in this release.
Get some color into your scenes
When you think of heathland plants, you immediately think of the star of the show: rhododendrons, so we've created a selection of distinctive species for you to choose from among the thousands of species and cultivars available. Add that extra bit of colors into your scenery with the blossoming rhododendron presets.
The main rhododendrons of the American Appalachians are at the top of the list: Rhododendron maximum and catawbiense, ubiquitous in undergrowth from Alabama to Maine. We've also included three popular catawbiense hybrids that allow you to discover more colors than just pink: white with 'Boule de Neige', mauve with 'Everstianum', and red with 'Nova Zembla'.
For Europeans, we added the famous Alpenrose of the Alps and the Pyrenees to the rhododendron selection.
To accompany the rhododendron sceneries, we added a bilberry plant and two more heather plants: the common heather in multiple colored varieties and the spring heather. These plants are also often seen growing next to Maritime pine trees, which thus round off this PlantCatalog release. Of course, the pine trees also include the Full Geometry (FG) versions which we introduced for large scale renderings with the previous PlantCatalog update.
And did you know that all plants are now fully PBR compliant? This ensures more consistency across all render engines and more physically accurate results.
Here is a list of all new species:
Maritime pine lone (Pinus pinaster lone)
Maritime pine forest (Pinus pinaster forest)
Common heather dark pink (Calluna vulgaris dark pink)
Common heather light pink (Calluna vulgaris light pink)
Common heather silver (Calluna vulgaris silver)
Common heather white (Calluna vulgaris white)
Spring heath dark pink (Erica carnea dark pink)
Spring heath light pink (Erica carnea light pink)
Spring heath white (Erica carnea white)
Mountain rosebay (Rhododendron catawbiense)
Alpenrose (Rhododendron ferrugineum)
Great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum)
Rhododendron "Nova Zembla'
Rhododendron 'Boule de neige'
Rhododendron 'Everestianum'
Please head to the Software Center and download the 2023.2 plant archive.
And while you are there, make sure you also download the new 2023 Hotfix 2 software updates - which offers updated compatibility with host applications such as 3ds Max and Maya 2024, as well as Unreal Engine 5.2.
The plant archives are now full installers which automatically copy all plant species files to the directory specified in the PlantCatalog Exporter (or VUE & PlantFactory) program options.
Also, on our YouTube channel, you can watch all new PlantCatalog species in action. Subscribe and don't miss out on the next updates to the Catalog.
PlantCatalog Trial available
Want to give the capabilities of PlantCatalog a test drive? We offer a trial version which includes PlantCatalog Exporter, the PlantFactory integration plugins for 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine 4 & 5 and a sample collection of procedural PlantCatalog plants for you to try, customize and export.
The following plants are included in the trial version:
With the plugins, you can customize procedural PlantCatalog plants natively in your host application and automatically create shaders for native render engines and for Arnold, Chaos V-RayTM, Redshift, Renderman and Unreal Engine 4 & 5. This makes pipeline integration easy.
Please note: the PlantCatalog trial version allows testing the full PlantCatalog product. Use within VUE or PlantFactory Creator is not covered by the trial.
Enjoy the update and happy rendering.
