3DGarden: Vegetation Without File Gardening

For those who don’t know the tool: 3DGarden is ITOOSOFT‘s scanned vegetation asset library for ForestPack Pro in 3ds Max. It supplies plants and planting presets; ForestPack controls their distribution and instancing.

Plants are only half the forest

Fifty-two tree species is a useful start. Nature’s catalogue is less restrained: the Xylothek at the Technical University of Munich holds over 10,000 wood samples and 22,000 microscope sections from more than 5,000 woody plant species. Why I’m bringing this up? I visited during last week’s “Lange Nacht der Museen” and was completely blown away. If you ever get a chance to visit: Do so! This is a scientific reference collection for wood identification and research. If you have never encountered a wood library, follow that link. Branch management has rarely looked so literal. 3DGarden tackles a different task: prepared vegetation, supplied materials and scatter setup within ForestPack’s Library Browser.

World Trees contains 52 species and more than 378 assets, with scanned trunk geometry, scanned textures and selected seasonal or growth variants. Its download is about 16 GB. Bushes and Flowers supplies 112 species and over 660 assets in roughly 15 GB, including variations in size, flowering state and growth form.

Ground Covers lists 100 species and a roughly 2.4 GB download, spanning grasses, flowering plants and natural surface detail. Ready-made presets cover lawns, fields and mixed planting. Individual models remain available for custom combinations: a preset establishes a starting population, while the artist still decides whether the planting belongs beside this particular building.

Install the library, preserve the paths

The manual installation workflow starts by extracting the collection without changing its directory structure. In a ForestPack object’s Library Browser, open File > Preferences, add the collection’s 3DGarden or ITOOSOFT Libraries folder under Library Paths, assign a label and choose Use Path. The documentation says the registered library appears across installed Max versions.

Materials are supplied for V-Ray and Corona Renderer, with Forest Color variation where provided. That is a specific material-delivery promise. ForestPack’s support for native instancing in other renderers does not establish equivalent ready-made materials for every 3DGarden item. Check the library asset and renderer together before committing the scene.

Distribution is a separate control system

ForestPack’s Image mode uses a distribution map inside a spline- or surface-defined area. White pixels create candidate positions and black pixels leave gaps; Use as Density Map interprets greyscale intensity as density. X/Y Units controls the map’s size in scene units. Changing that scale changes the spatial repetition of the distribution.

Species selection has its own logic. Random mode uses Geometry List probabilities; Match Color ID on Map assigns species from map colours and ignores those probability values. Clusters groups items of the same type, with Size, Roughness, Blurry Edge and Noise controls. It requires multiple Geometry List entries. Clustering one lonely shrub is, technically, still one lonely shrub.

Transform randomisation then varies translation, rotation and scale. Scale ranges can be independent on X, Y and Z or preserve proportions through Lock aspect ratio; probability curves shape the value distribution. Translation happens after initial placement and can push instances beyond an area spline, so a clean planting boundary needs checking after variation is applied.

Compatibility before chlorophyll

Our Forest Pack 9.3.5 coverage explained collision checks across distribution modes and the Library Browser’s portable .pmat support. Those belong to the scattering host. Buying a plant collection does not itself upgrade the host’s placement rules, material handling or Effects system.

The current ForestPack requirements officially cover 3ds Max 2023 to 2027 on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. Older builds are included but untested. The separate 3DGarden page lists older asset compatibility floors, including V-Ray 3.0 and Corona 1.6; use the current host requirements when planning deployment.

For production, test a representative foreground plant, the intended material and a dense scatter in the actual renderer. Instancing organises repeated geometry; it does not make scene complexity disappear. Keep species choice, placement density and appearance variation as separate decisions, then inspect the combined result. A botanical catalogue cannot diagnose a render budget.

Availability and pricing

The collections are available now with perpetual licences: World Trees costs €495, Bushes and Flowers €395 and Ground Covers €195, all excluding VAT. Each collection page also offers a free sample. ForestPack Pro is required for the documented workflow. The collection prices buy the vegetation, not a licence to ignore the rest of the pipeline. And sadly, a green thumb to get your physical flowers of the edge is not included.

P.S. In this case, we want props for not making puns like “Knock on wood the render works” or “The client doesn’t see the forest because of the trees” and similar ones.