ngPlant turned 10 this year. I am happy to see that this small application is still used by many people. I would like to thank everyone who helps in development of ngPlant and all who used it to create amazing models. Special thanks to James Allen, Yorik van Havre and Marco Rochowski who shared their models so we could create plant database which now contains about 50 beautiful plants.
I think that it would be great to celebrate 10th anniversary of ngPlant with something interesting. So I’d like to announce first public release of WebPlant – simple implementation of ngPlant in JavaScript which works on most desktop browsers (no mobile support yet). It supports loading of .ngp and .nga files, basic model editing, saving to .ngp and .nga, as well as exporting to .obj format. One special feature of WebPlant which is absent in ngPlant is direct access to plants database directly from application (just open “Examples…” listbox and select the plant you want to load). It has several restrictions in comparison with ngPlant application, in particular – no g-mesh branch support, no support for billboard leaves and absent support (for obvious reason) for Lua plugins. Please note, that since this is first release, it is possible that some errors in code were unnoticed, so please let me know about any errors you find (including incompatibilities with ngPlant).
So, if you like to test WebPlant (for instance by browsing plant database), just open WebPlant page, click “Examples…” listbox, choose model you like, wait for several seconds (WebPlant loads model to your browser, so time may vary depending on your internet speed and model size) and enjoy!
Oh, by the way all source code of WebPlant is available on github under BSD license. Similarly to ngPlant, WebPlant contains “core” library which can be used in other projects (such as design or game applications) for plant model generation on the fly.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!