Kraut Tree Editor is a hobby project that I have been working on in my spare time for about 8 months. It is a program to generate tree geometry that is optimized for use in real-time rendering applications.

Trees are mostly generated procedurally, the user provides the parameters how it should grow and look like. Different variations of the same tree can be easily generated by changing a random seed value.

The program automatically generates level-of-detail meshes. For example the tree in the main image consists of 50.000 triangles in the unoptimized base form (which is not supposed to be used at runtime). However, LOD0 (which looks nearly identical) only takes 4000 triangles (with the default LOD settings). With each subsequent LOD the settings can be tweaked to reduce the polygon-count more and more.

I started working on this project because I was always impressed with what SpeedTree does, but I could never find a free program that would do something similar. There are a few free programs out there that allow you to generate trees procedurally, but most only allow you to generate highly detailed tree geometry (often generating millions of polygons, by modelling every single leaf). None of the ones I found seemed to actually try to solve the problem to render trees as fast as possible, by providing proper level-of-detail meshes, and by making it easy to collapse branches and leaves into textures. I'm pretty sure that there ARE such programs and I simply haven't found them, but in the end I just needed a new hobby project and this one was challenging enough to be fun.

During this project I learned that it takes A LOT of parameters to describe a tree, and that it is difficult to not overwhelm the user with options. I also learned to appreciate nature even more ;-)

The project is still in an early version. There are quite a lot of features that I haven't been able to try out yet and that are on my todo list. However I wanted to release a beta now to get some feedback. It has some bugs, the usability could be better (actually I'm working on that right now) and there is no documentation except for the tooltips.

It is free for both non-commercial and commercial use. You can download it at:
http://www.artifactgames.de/Kraut

I hope it is of use to someone. If you use it in your project (however small it is), I would be happy to hear about it.

Click here to view the iotd

Nice work! I don't have time to test it now, but looks great. I kind of hope that you had posted this half a year back, because I was also looking for a free tree generator for real-time use. The best I could find was frecle's tree[d], but I would have liked to have LOD and animations, so eventually I ended up writing a generator of my own.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

There are currently no animations on the tree. I have an experimental wind-animation feature, but it is quite crappy. Also though it supports FBX export, I don't export bones or animations. At some point it is planned to improve this, but at the moment I am working on more basic features. For example I have recently implemented a visual editor to configure the tree (which types of branches grow on which other types of branches), because the current workflow is just not very intuitive.
Also it allowed me to clean up the GUI and reduce the number of settings a bit.

Other than that, I plan on adding billboard leaf types and some more branch mesh deformations for the near future.

Just to let you know, Beta 2 is now available:
http://artifactgames.de/Kraut

Lots of improvements, better UI, new impostor LOD mode, proper export file format, etc. etc.
Just try it out :-)