hahattpro
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- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
And artificial scarcity will help fix over population by starving some.
- Comment on Are password managers secure to use? 5 weeks ago:
More secure than write to your notepad or text file, for sure.
If you can keep password from your computer (best: just remember it without reuse 1 for everywhere, second best: write in your notebook, don’t reuse password).
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Wiki allow anyone to edit. So, just make one page
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Coaching Streaming (game is just a medium to perform, like if you are singer, you performed it via a song, …) Go pro (competitive esport) for prize, or sponsorship (which your team pay you maybe percentages or fixed salaries or both) Farmer (play for stuff in MMO and sell it) Sitter, booster (login someone account and play for them)
- Comment on Digging Into PlantStudio, an odd little plant creation program, a Bit Late 5 weeks ago:
I text dump for those who don’t want, can’t click the link.
- Comment on Digging Into PlantStudio, an odd little plant creation program, a Bit Late 5 weeks ago:
About Archives RSS Kinopio Oct ’24 Digging Into PlantStudio, a Bit Late learning design This aesthetic screenshot of an old windows app has been in my inspiration space for ~5 years. Until recently, I assumed that it was just a nostalgia bait concept.
The calm, serene life associated with gardening pairs suspiciously well with rose-tinted wistfulness for a simpler time in computing. I’m happy to be wrong though, because software doesn’t get more real than PlantStudio.
Written by Kurtz-Fernhout Software, PlantStudio is a surprisingly deep botany simulator for creating and arranging 3D models of herbaceous plants based on how real plants grow, change, fruit, and flower, over their life cycles.
How to Install Because the last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, we’ve got a little bit of work to do to get it running on macOS:
Download PlantStudio210.zip and unzip it Download Whisky to run windows code in a container called a bottle In Whisky, click + button to create a new bottle (I set it to Windows 10) Click Open C: Drive and copy the PlantStudio210 folder into Program Files Click Run and open Program Files/PlantStudio210/PlantStudio.exe PlantStudio lives again 🌱🌺
Let’s Grow Some 3D Plants After you read or skip the tutorial docs, you’re be greeted with an empty window, which is kind of like the ‘garden’ that your plants will live in. One way to jump in is to File → Open some sample files.
The interface is full of unlabelled and unfamiliar icons, but the hover tooltips in PlantStudio are the most verbose I’ve ever seen – which helps a lot.
Rotate mode tooltip To fill the garden with our own herbs, shrubs, and flowers, use Plant → Create New… which opens the thorough 10-step Plant Wizard, and teaches us some biology terms along the way.
Going through the Plant Wizard… Each option button has a detailed little illustration that makes the impacts of technical concepts, like ‘inflorescence’, easy to understand.
I also love the wizard progress icons in the footer. Because the colors match the button illustrations, it’s easy to jump from editing stems and leaves (green icons), to editing flower related options (purple icons). The start and stop traffic lights for the intro and confirmation steps serve as cute bookends.
Designers can use color to conceptually link related interfaces together. I did this when I redesigned Futureland a couple years ago.
One thing I kept wishing for while creating plants was the ability to see a live preview while I was selecting options. Maybe they didn’t think of that, or maybe the performance impacts would’ve been too much for the minimum required 100MHz CPU of the day.
Cultivating a Garden As you create plants, they’ll appear in the garden area, where you can arrange them by scaling, rotating, editing, posing, and even changing their age.
It took awhile, but by repeatedly creating plants in the wizard and arranging each one, even I could make something pleasant enough:
I could’ve probably saved some time by selecting one or multiple plants to Plant → Breed to create offspring. The Breeder lets you define how similar the children are from their parents, and adjust the amount of mutation (random chance changes).
Export Options You can be creative with your plants models by exporting jpg, 3ds, or obj files into other art apps. The official Gallery has a couple y2k-era masterpieces that were composed with whimsical 3D tools like Bryce, and then polished in 2D art tools like Paintshop Pro and Photoshop.
Artist’s note: “I created this picture with Metacreations Poser3, Bryce3 and Photoshop5. I used Photoshop5 to give the violet leaves some texture, and refined the shape of the leaves and petals…” (source) The process for making these images is strikingly similar to what landscape architects do today. Much like how software designers use mockups, architects use 3D renderings to convince clients, to market their work, and as a starting point for working with contractors.
(source, Plantkind) Also, plants look really cool inside Kinopio spaces. Maybe I’ll figure out some kind of ‘integration’ in the future…
So Why Am I Only Finding Out About Plantstudio Now? The husband and wife duo Paul Fernhout and Cynthia Kurtz were the authors behind Kurtz-Fernhout Software. Unsurprisingly, both have degrees in Biology and Ecology.
Their original goal was to build a gardening simulator to “help people understand how to garden in a more sustainable way in their own backyards”. The simulation was based the EPIC (Erosion/Productivity Impact Calculator) agricultural model by the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
We worked as a team on most design phases of the project. Paul did most of the low-level coding, the general architecture, the undo/redo system, the file system, the graphical display, and the 3D turtle engine. Cynthia did most of the translation of the EPIC model, the flowering/fruiting submodel, the plant drawing algorithm, the various window designs, and the artwork, music, and documentation.
PlantStudio was originally built to draw plants for the gardening simulator, but they “found that everyone tended to like the plant designer so much they wanted to play with it instead of with the garden simulator”, so released it separately.
Not entirely dissimilar to the story behind SimCity,
While developing his first commercial game […], Will Wright noticed that designing city maps for the player to fly over in a helicopter was more fun than actually [playing the game]. He began expanding his world-building tools as an experiment. He applied various urban planning and computer modelling theories, implementing whatever ideas he’d been reading.
Sticking to the theme, SimCity for Windows (source) Unfortunately, PlantStudio was discontinued in 2002,
What happened to our old software and the plans for it? We spent years working for other people to pay off money (with interest) we borrowed to finish it and free it.
I empathize with their story because the world is rarely kind to organic niche creative consumer software. I’m sure the market at the time was a lot more developer friendly overall, but businesses need to always be reaching new people to sell more licenses.
In an alternate universe, maybe PlantStudio could have survived by evolving into a game in the vein of SimCity and SimEarth, e.g. ‘SimGarden’.
Incidental Beauty There’s something appealing about objects and interfaces built for purpose, like race cars and professional-use espresso machines. In cases like these, beauty feels like a byproduct of an object built to do it’s job well – and there’s something appealingly genuine about that.
Back when I worked at Fog Creek Software there was a $10k Marzocco professional espresso machine in the break room that we were trained on as part of our onboarding. I don’t even like espresso, but I do miss using it sometimes. I’d describe PlantStudio the same way. It doesn’t look or work like a modern app, but anyone can figure it out because it’s interface elements are delightfully chunky, unfussy, and well documented by illustrations, inline text, and tooltips.
It’s definetely not for everyone, but the best things rarely are. Creating those gardens gave me a new perspective – and some new ideas – for my own design work.
It took a while, but I’m glad I found PlantStudio.
Special thanks to Lily from Plantkind for giving me a bit of insight into his landscape architecture practice for this post.
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- Comment on Digging Into PlantStudio, an odd little plant creation program, a Bit Late 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Digging Into PlantStudio, an odd little plant creation program, a Bit Late 5 weeks ago:
What is PlantStudio?
PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. PlantStudio simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can “grow” plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the “evolutionary arts” of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes.
plants This just in… PlantStudio is now free! See our press release page for more information.
How can I find out more? Check out PlantStudio’s features and requirements; look at the PlantStudio Gallery and Plant Exchange Area; take a look at some PlantStudio screen shots; read the reviews and user comments; and download the evaluation version! A copy of the help system on-line explains how the simulation works and which plants it draws best. phlox Great! How do I get it? You can download a fully-functional evaluation copy of PlantStudio now!
violet What does it run on? PlantStudio requires Windows 95/98/NT/2000/Me.
What’s in the future for PlantStudio? Feel free to weigh in on our PS3 wish list. And for a hint of PlantStudio’s past, here is a page about the history of PlantStudio.
- Comment on 15 Photos of Summer Vacation in the ’70s 5 weeks ago:
Can you just post the image, not the link only ?
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Someone high while chatting with chatgpt.
- Comment on It is like LLMs are massively overhyped and can't even do half the things its advertised... 2 months ago:
Fire full time employee, cited AI. Hire them back as gig worker, contractor.
Profit ???!!!??
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What is trakt do ?
- Comment on More Americans are financing groceries with buy now, pay later loans — and more are paying those bills late, survey says 3 months ago:
As a person of developing countries who have prefer in cash, i still don’t get the idea yet.
Is it like credit card? Credit card existed in my country but only rich pop in offfice use it.
- Comment on There are now Youtube channels entirely made by A"I" 3 months ago:
It existed long ago. Those styles of side hustle MMO bros call faceless channel.
Before, they hired voice actor, editor, content writer over freelance site. Now they just replace those ‘seat’ with AI .
- Comment on Starbreeze Has Taken Payday 3 Publishing Rights From Plaion 3 months ago:
That game suck anyway. Why Starbreeze want it ? I still play payday 2.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
But you also need another job at night for living.
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Is there any in-production instance of this Sriracha i can join ?
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What is this ?
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What a meowingful day !!
- Comment on I've never said "I love you" to my sister 5 months ago:
Watch anime more, bro. Then you will less likely to shy from saying “i love you” to your sister.
- Comment on What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? 5 months ago:
Because if you are playing old version, you aren’t having time to play new version.
Those greedy publisher doesn’t want their old, better and well cared product cannibal on sales of their new products.
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You got to be empathy and spreading empathy bro
- Comment on Microsoft Teams is dog shit 9 months ago:
So does discord
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I am cancelling
- Comment on Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software 9 months ago:
After 10 minutes of google search and digging, i still cannot find the price of this Flow-3D software. (I.e: contact the distributor for pricing)
- Comment on Postbox Acquired by eM Client, Ends Development. 9 months ago:
eM Client pricing
- US couple blocked from suing Uber after crash say daughter agreed to Uber Eats termswww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 10 months ago to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world | 119 comments
