System vegetation
System vegetation (aka "Linden plants") is an old feature for creating vegetation. It was introduced to Second Life by Linden Lab early in 2008 and seems to have been inspired by SpeedTree. It was a bit of a rush job though and it has never been updated so they are quite limited. They do have their uses though and some builders have done some remarkably good creative work with them.
System trees and grass
There are two different kinds of System vegetation, "System trees" and "System grass". Both names are rather misleading since they can be used for quite a bit more:
- A "system tree" is a single relatively elaborate plant. In addition to trees, the feature is also used for bushes, ferns and grass clumps.
- A "system grass" is made from 32 single sheets spread across an area. In addition to grass, the feature is also used for undergrowth shrubbery.
Limitations
- System vegetation is limited to the old 10 m max size, so no tall trees.
- System grass automatically aligns with the system ground. This can be an advantage but it also means it doesn't work on sky platforms.
- The selection of plants available is very limited and, let's face it, not always very well chosen.
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Many of the plants have rather dodgy textures. (I told you it was a rush job, didn't I?)
Variants
I've marked the different variants with different background colors depending on my opinion about them (you're free to make up your own mind of course). Green means can be useful, yellow means don't rue it out completely, red is useless.
System trees:
- Actual trees:
- Cypress 1
- I'm not sure what kind of tree this is, it certainly doesn't look like a cypress to me.
- Cypress 2
- Not really a cypress. That is, the texture seems to be of a cypress (hard to tell with the low resolution) but the shape is all wrong. It's still quite useful as a generic small early summer hardoow tree though and there is a reason why it seems to be one of the most popular (or should I rather say least unpopular?) system tree.
- Dogwood
- The texture may be a drawing or it may be an over-edited photo, not sure.
- Eucalyptus
- One of the best textures in the set but the trunk shape is too angular.
- Oak
- This is not an oak, it's a maple! A very small one in brownish-red automn colors. I've makred it as yellow partly because of the diminutive size, partly because it's been so overused. In the right settigns it can actually be very effective.
- Palm 1
- A really nice and amazingly realistc looking coconut palm.
- Palm 2
- A half withered coconut palm. This is one of the better system trees but it's so small. A palm as old as this one obviously is, should be twice as tall.
- Pine 1
- It looks more like a spruce than a pine to me but it's hard to
tell withut more details. This is definitely one of the better system
trees although the bark texture look a bit too simplistic.
- Pine 2
- This too looks more like a spruce than a pine to me but it's hard to tell withut more details. This is also one of the better system trees but I don't think it's quite as good as Pine 1
- Winter Aspen
- A with birsh branch and a bare branch edited to be all white. It can work in a winter fantasy setting.
- Winter Pine 1
- A spruce (or possibly pine) with some white blotches added to simulate snow. It doesn't sound very promising but it actually works.
- Winter Pine 2
- With even more fake snow than Winter Pine 1 and it still works quite well. At least in a fantasy settings. Trees hardly ever get their trunks covered by snow this way.
- Bushes:
- Plumeria
- Ridiculously oversized by default and with a rather tacky drawing based texture. I've marked it with red here but I have actually seen it been used effectively. The poor texture means it won't work anywhere near an upfront setting but if people could jsut be bothered to scale it down, it might do as a decent background plant and as a supplement to dense groups of other system plants.
- Tropical bush 1
- Really nice photo based texture
- Tropical bush 2
- Really nice photo based texture.
- Other land plants:
- Beach Grass
- A clump of grass that should work everywhere, not just on beaches. It's very dense though and tend to look rather "blocky". The texture is a photo.
- Fern
- A susprisingly good system plants, one of the best and unlike so many of the others, it works in many settings. The only real limitation is that the color is very bright green. The texture is a photo.
- Aquatic plants:
- Eelgrass
- A really good generic green plant. It works as a reular grass clump above water too and ir probably better that the beach grass for that.
- Kelp 1
- Brown kelp. This is one of the really good ones. The only real limitation is that you only get a single plant for one land impact. The texture seems to be based on a drawing, probably an illustration from an old textbook.
- Kelp 2
- Green kelp. Apart from that, more or less the same as Kelp 1.
- Sea Sword
- This is one of the gems of the set. The texture is a photo.
System grass:
- Actual grass:
- Grass 0
- A really good generic grass texture but like all the grasses, with only 32 scattered instances it's hard to make much out of it. The texture is a photo.
- Grass 1
- A very dense clump of grass, way too dense to be useful. The texture is a photo.
- Grass 2
- The same as Grass 0, only taller.
- Grass 3
- Another wayy too dense clup of grass. The texture is a photo.
- Grass 4
- Grass 0 with the tops of the straws tinted red to make it look like late summer/autumn grass. That idea works well but it still ahs the same limitations as Grass 0
- Undegrowth:
- undergrowth_1
- A spread of low shrubs, I'm not sure abut the species but it seems like alder to me. One of the hidden gems of the selection.
Custom system vegetation
In theory it's fairly easy to make custom system vegetation. Each variant is made from a single texture and a small set of parameters and all the data is stored locally in two xml files. In reality this is only an option for closed single user grids though. System vegetation is all client-side, so unless you can convince everybody to use your custom xml files, only you wil be able to see your creations.
But if you want to give it a try, here are the parameters (no info aout what they do yet, sorry).
System trees:
- tree name
- species_id
- texture_id
- droop
- twist
- branches
- depth
- scale_step
- trunk_depth
- branch_length
- trunk_length
- leaf_scale
- billboard_scale
- billboard_ratio
- trunk_aspect
- branch_aspect
- leaf_rotate
- noise_mag
- noise_scale
- taper
repeat_z
System grass:
- name
- species_id
- texture_id
- blade_size_x
- blade_size_y
