12 bugs in Flamingo nXt plant editor

[Andrew Nowicki]

Flamingo and AccuRender are very similar, so all these bugs may be present in AccuRender plant editor.

1. There is a Height slider in the Trunk panel. The slider is frozen - there is no way to move it.

2. There is a conflict between Angle sliders and other sliders. When the trunk is bent, and the Angle slider is moved between 0 and 1, the trunk is abruptly rotated by about 90 degrees around vertical axis.

3. There are Angle and Bending sliders in the Trunk panel. The Angle sets trunk angle at ground level, while the Bending slider bends the trunk along its length. These sliders produce unpredictable results. For example, when the Bending slider is set to its maximum value (100), the trunk is always vertical and almost perfectly straight, regardless of the position of the Angle slider.

4. There are Bending boxes in the Complex panel. The boxes are always blank - they do not display any information about bending. The Flatten checkbox in the Complex panel does not work.

5. The Leaf Spacing slider in the Palm panel inadvertently bends the fronds up when the spacing is increased.

6. The Complex panel and Foliage panel have many sliders and options. None of them are explained in the Flamingo help file. The Flamingo help file calls the plant editor 'plant generator.'

7. The plant editor is searching the wrong folder for its leaves, flowers and bark. The editor is always searching C:\Program Files\Rhinoceros 5.0 (64-bit)\System, but there are no leaves, flowers, bark or grass in this location.
Leaves are located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Flamingo nXt\Support\Plants\Leaves
Flowers are located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Flamingo nXt\Support\Plants\Flowers
Several kinds of bark are located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Flamingo nXt\Support\Plants\Bark

8. The plant editor ignores all Flamingo library folders and all Flamingo search paths.

9. There is no way to change default search path of the plant editor. The editor always looks for its leaves, flowers and bark in the wrong folder.

10. The plant editor forces powerful CPU of my new laptop to run at 16% of its full speed when the editor is perfectly idle. When I turn off the plant editor, the CPU drops to 1% of its full speed.

11. This is a minor bug. When the plant editor is launched, it always opens the same plant. The user can either edit this plant, or choose to edit another plant. It would be convenient to choose the plant to be edited as soon as the plant editor is launched.

12. Another minor bug. The FlamingoNXtDebugOptions command displays a window. The window has a help icon which provides no help.

There is minor flaw in the Conifer panel. Its Taper slider is not realistic. It can make very broad top branches, but it cannot make very broad bottom branches.

This is a wish, rather than a bug: Groundcover Neatness slider stretches the groundcover in the vertical direction. This is useful feature, but it would be more useful if the slider could stretch it more. A perfect groundcover plant would also have a simple, cylindrical stem that would stretch along with the leaves.

Flamingo plants are difficult to edit because the plant editor is buggy, but their renditions look realistic. Xfrog (http://xfrog.com/) plants look even more realistic, but they are more expensive ($$$!) and they bloat CAD model files. The Xfrog website does not mention the speed of rendition, so there is no reason to believe that the Xfrog plants render quickly.

I use Rhino 5.0 commercial version (2013-01-29, 64-bit), Flamingo nXt (2012-9-28), Windows 8 Pro OEM 64-bit bit operating system, ThinkPad W530 laptop computer with Intel Core i7 3920XM processor, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Quadro K2000M graphics card, 15,6 inch LCD (1920x1080).

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Thanks for this-- many of these items exist across all platforms.