Plant Studio

Even though Plant Studio is software designed for gardening, its creators did not forget about the graphics world. With Plant Studio you can create brushes for Painter and tubes for Paint Shop Pro, along with just about any plant form you can imagine! There are no limits with this software for creating herbaceous, non tree plants.

When you first open Plant Studio you have several options before you actually get to a screen like the above example. You can take a speedy tour, use the pre-made plant library, or even create your own plant. The image above represents the bushes/grasses library that is included in the software. On the bottom left is the list of plants in the library, and the bottom right are tabs to allow you to manipulate the plant. There is a button there as well that allows you to "animate" which starts the plant you are working on at the seed stage and "animates" through all the stages of development until it is mature.  You can stop the growth at any point and save that image if you like.  You can also breed plants to come up with some interesting results!

One of the things that are really cool about this, is that you can create your own plants and make your own plant library. You can then create tubes for Paint Shop Pro or brushes for Painter. If you have ever made tubes for Paint Shop Pro, you know sometimes how hard and time consuming it is to clean an image of all those messy colored pixels that attach themselves to your images when you make them transparent. Not so with Plant Studio. You can export an image for use specifically as brushes for Painter or tubes for Paint Shop Pro 5 and they are already cleaned. All you have to do is open the .bmp in PSP and set up the tube file as you normally would.

This is the bitmap file that is exported.

This is the tube file created from the bitmap file with no other work except to create the file.

And this is one of the plants from the tube painted, without editing to a black background. As you can see there are no white pixels attached as usually happens when creating an image for a tube.

If you want to you can view only one image at a time instead of the full library. This gives you more room to edit your plant without the others distracting you from your focus on this one.

Creating your own plants is one of the best parts also. I don't know about you, but when I have a plant in mind for an image, I have a specific shape and color that I want. We all know that finding just the right flora for images can be a tough job. Plant Studio makes it easy.  You are only limited by your imagination and if your imagination doesn't kick in, play! I did! Some of the flora I came up with was really fun.

The Plant Studio site also offers free brushes for Painter and PSP tubes to registered users. A section where they add new plants regularly, plus a tips section is also available.

The above plants are from the free files you can pick up at the plant studio site. When you get there, all you have to do is copy a text file to the clipboard, and there is a utility in Plant Studio, "Paste from text file" that automatically codes the plants into the software. So if you visit the site with Plant Studio open, it's just a matter of copying to the clipboard, and clicking a menu option in Plant Studio to set up the new plants they offer, for free!

I think this is a great piece of software and it won't break your pocket book either! You can pick up this great piece of software at the Plant Studio site.

System Requirements

Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 (or emulation on Mac)
100 MHz Pentium or faster (or equivalent speed on Mac)
8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended)
256-color video capability (16-bit color or better strongly recommended)
mouse or other pointing device
5 MB hard disk space

Price: 19.95$US (no, there's no mistake, it's just nineteen dollars and 95 cents!)

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved