A 3d plant library in Blender

Why create your own plant library

If you regularly create nature scenes, you need: 

• A good scatter system (or the Blender 5+ one)
• A library of quality plants with enough variety

Having your collection of plants ready at the start of the creation process is essential or you will spend more time gathering resources than actually creating your scene.

 

All plant collections are not equal and there is a whole world between old XFrog plants and Evermotion or MaxTree ones.

I tested many ones over the years and you will find a selection of resources with my comments on each. Please note that I have not tested EVERY plant library available: there are far too many!

How to select the right plant collection

Realism

If your first concern is to try to make your scenes believable, then the degree of realism of the plants will be paramount. Most recent plant library are of optimal quality in this respect, but you can pay attention to the following details: 

• Overall shape of the plant (should be close to reality)
• Leaf shape, distribution and orientation
• Trunk branching junctions (bulge or harmonious transitions)
• Details such as the roots, moss or mushrooms growing on trees
• Trunk, stem or leaf texture details
• Leaf translucency

 

Plant variants

A good collection will propose several iterations of the same specie to prevent your scenes from being too repetitive.

Look for the following options: 

• Different plant age or plant growth (saplings to full grown tree)
• Different plant shapes depending on the environment (forest vs single tree)
• Seasonal changes
• Plant health variations

 

Plant naming

It may seem trivial, but the choices in plant naming are actually a good way to determine if the plant collection creator was serious or not.

There are three levels: 

• Generic name: Bush_016
  You may have trouble finding appropriate plants if they are all named that way
• Common name: Hazelnut
  Generally appropriate, provided the names are in your language
• Latin name: Corylus avellana
  If you are a serious gardener, you probably know plants by their latin name.

 

 

Plant classification

I have chosen to make my own classification by type of specie (deciduous trees, conifers, flowers...) but you may want to add more details.

Some libraries enable you to select plants using filters by: 

• Plant type
• Plant family
• Type of biome (jungle, coniferous forest)
• Origin (by continent) 

Plant creation software

The Plant Factory 2024

The Plant Factory is a plant creation software by the now defunct e-On Software company. It features a very comprehensive (and complex) creation process. The software comes along with a basic content library and a more complex one called The Plant Catalog.

The new owner of e-On Software decided to stop developing these products in 2024. They are now available for free on the Bentley Systems website.

You can download the last version: The Plant Factory 2024.

Do not forget to also download the Plant Catalog at the bottom of the page.

The collections contain a correct amount of plants, carefully crafted by a landscaper. Most of them (and all the trees) have variants by growth, season and health. Some have variants by biome: forest or not.

You can also create plants for your own needs with The Plant Factory, although the software is a tad compled. I have a series of tutorials about this.

There is a plugin to import these plants directly into Blender called PF2B. It makes the import process quick and easy.

Also consider: SpeedTree, The Grove

General asset libraries

Some libraries containing various types of assets (materials, 3d models) also propose plants, generally in fbx format. 

Quixel Megascans

Even before Quixel launched its first tree in 2021, there was already a large number of plants available in its inventory of 3d Assets. And the quality has improved from the start, along with a better naming and tagging. 
Even now, I still use them regularly.

The plants have detailed textures with damaged leaves. Each specie comes in different sizes and health. 

Too bad their trees are only for Unreal Engine because they also look great.

All these plants are now available on Fab.

 

Textures.com

As strange as it may seem, textures.com has a collection of plants under the name 3D Foliage. And they are of very nice quality. Each plant has several variant and sizes and detailed textures. 

Models are sorted by biome and contain ground plants, crops and more recently trees.

They will have to be imported in FBX format and set up in Blender.

Fab.com

The EPIC mega 3d marketplace has a few resellers specialized in plants that have interesting catalogs: 

• 3dGardenPlants. Not only garden plants, but some edible ones and packs.
• Gold3dLab. A bit of everything, but mostly garden plants. Some extensive (and expensive) packs.

Artstation

This marketplace has a very prolific plant creator: PandoraLand.
Plants are multi-format, reasonably priced and they look good.

Evermotion

Among other things, Evermotion proposes plant packs. When purchased on Superhive, they include some very helpful GeoScatter biomes. Other Evermotion plants are included in the Botaniq plant collection (more on this one later).

Graswald

This collection was once sold alongside the GScatter plugin. It is now offered for free. The Graswald example renders initially impressed me and the plants are very detailed and realistic. They are sorted by biome.

Blender specific collections

When I started using Blender (after years of C4D/Octane)C, I was impressed by the number of plugins and asset packs that were proposed. I have regularly shopped on Superhive or Gumroad to increase my collection.

Polygoniq

This is more than simple asset pack and plant libraries. Polygoniq offers a specific asset browser called Engon (and available for free) in which you can load lots of things, among which: 

• The Botaniq tree and grass library containing more than 1000 assets: plants, trees, rocks... 
• The Shaker Trees library by 3D Shaker with 700+ assets
• Vegetation pack 1 containing a selection of Evermotion plants
• Vegetation pack 2 with more Evermotion plants

There are also sets of biomes included in the Botaniq library.
The Engon system allows loading more than plants:  there isalso a water assets library or the Traffiq pack with all sorts of vehicles.

 

Bagapie 

Baga Pie has a lot to offer for natural scenes, including: 

• A large asset pack with more than 700 plants, ground elements (similar to the ones of Megascans), rocks and tree branches
• Baga Grove, with a series of Evermotion assets arranged in Urban, Garden and Wild biomes
• Baga Ivy : the best Ivy generation system: with 36 different species that include classic ivy, clematis and even akebia quinata,  actinidia and grapes