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The Grove

simulates trees

A natural simulation that grows trees in an engaging Blender add-on. With fun tools like prune, draw, react and bend, you can take an active role in art directing your trees, but for the most part, just let nature take its course and watch as the trees grow year by year.

The Grove captures all kinds of trees, with natural parameters that come straight from the woods. Click to load diverse presets like , or an expanding grove of - grow everything from slender to a powerful , all the way down to a weeping .

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Believe it or not, above you can experience the actual simulation and see how it grows. However, the trees are severely stylized to keep your browser happy - the offline version grows much faster and taller, with bark and detailed twigs. Purchase a license to unlock the full power of The Grove.

Made for you

The Grove will grow you the most natural trees ever seen in computer graphics - custom trees that are a perfect match for every project you work on. It is used in architecture, art, research, games, animation and film VFX.

The unique way of growing is what makes it so fast and easy to use, but it doesn't stop there. Bring your trees to life with lush foliage, animated wind, recorded time-lapses, a skeleton of bones and a rich set of attributes.

Interactively direct your trees with the fun tools in the Blender add-on, or experiment freely with the Houdini add-on beta. Experience the most natural way of growing trees in 3D!

Dive in with the pruning tool to remove branches that block the view, to create space, air and neat contours. Then keep on growing.

I'll see your drawing and raise you a tree! Freely draw a curvy branch, or loosely sketch to fill a gap.

Bend any branch or even the trunk - just like in the art of bonsai, but here it is for full-grown branches, impossibly flexible and so much fun!

True to nature

At its core The Grove is a full simulation of the natural processes in living trees that react to light and gravity. With a keen eye for improvement, meticulous research and by always staying true to nature, it has become a beautiful blend of nature and computer graphics. The Grove unravels the mysteries of how real trees grow - while taking out the technicalities - so that you can just grow.

Natural parameters will guide the growth of every branch, all the way up from trunk to twig. Even the slightest change will resonate through all the tree's branches.

As trees grow tall toward the sky, they compete with their neighbors that take away light. But the biggest competition is the very tree itself, where new leaves above cast shadows over the old underneath.

Growing branches will bend over time - it's the increase in weight that keeps pulling them down. The tree reacts and keeps growing upward, creating an interplay of forces that will shape its form with each passing season.

Living trees

The Grove draws from a life-long passion for computer graphics, using familiar concepts like raytracing for light-and-shade calculation, and a purpose-built wire physics simulation that bends and shapes your trees throughout their life. No shortcuts taken!

Left - a mixed grove of aspen, birch, pine, oak and fir trees, by Carl Roe.

The way of growing year-by-year is a fascinating time lapse just waiting to be captured. Record it to see trees like never before - turning decades into seconds, it will change the way you look at trees.

Set up an environment to attract, deflect, or stop new branches as they grow. Avoid a building and let it cast shade. Or get creative and grow inside a shape!

Bring your trees to life with mesmerizing wind. Use shape keys, bones or a slight breeze through the twigs.

The Grove Core is a high-performance, compiled module that runs the simulation. Add-ons import this module and use its Python API.

The Grove in Blender adds a polished UI and a bunch of awesome tools for interactive simulation - grow, prune, bend, draw, react, wind... It's a fast and super fun user experience!

The Grove in Houdini plugs directly into the node network to grow procedural trees that are ready for Houdini's dynamics. The beta is available now with the Studio edition.

Lush foliage

Trees are some of the most complex objects in computer graphics, with their numerous leaves, flowers and fruits - so this is where twigs take over. Twigs are small branches that use regular 3D geometry to represent the last growth of the tree.

Twig instances attach fluently to branch ends and alongside your tree's branches, taking less GPU memory and increasing rendering performance. You can model twigs to any level of detail, or purchase The Grove's handmade twigs to get stunning results.

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About The Grove

The Grove is actively developed by F12. Over a decade of visualizing architecture culminated in the easiest, fastest and most natural tool for growing 3D trees. Let nature take its course and grow majestic 3D models of trees for visualization, art and film.

The Grove runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, with Blender or SideFX Houdini. The Grove is not associated with Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Blender and SideFX - the logos are trademarks of their respective owners.

This interactive preview of the simulation is for evaluation purposes only - you may not use the output without written consent. Purchase a license to unlock the full power of The Grove.

Illustrations by Arthur van 't Hoog. Renders by Carl Roe, Mason Menzies.

This site only uses cookies necessary for a functioning website and web shop - no tracking and no ads. Please read The Grove's privacy policy.

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Contacts

The Biotope, Kerklaan 30, Haren, The Netherlands
wybren@thegrove3d.com

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