ST; interesting extra feature!

[KyL]

It's a pity that trees are so nasty to unwrap, otherwise it would be just great if you could easily paint your textures on the tree and thus have much better control over the 'flow' of the textures from stem to branch.

You could do that in Mari for example. A tree generated from speedtree should only need minor UV tweaks to be paintable in Mari. I am pretty sure you could just auto UV layout the thing and paint right away!

[Tangled-Universe]

Well if so then that would be a really viable option to save money for
I'm really held off by this modelling if I feel I need to use a lot of different apps and a lot of tweaks/cheats/conversions to get what I want, ultimately.

ST and Mari, without too much UV hassling, would be great.

[mhaze]

Not to mention the cost £1200 for Mari  and a similar cost for speed tree!!!!!  I can barely afford terragen on my pension!

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes definitely true.
Affording is one, justifying it to yourself is another.

[KyL]

There is the Indie version of Mari that has been released last week:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/433930/

It has some limitation, but definitely nothing stopping you from texturing a simple (or even more complex) tree!

[yossam]

Read the fine print................"custom shaders not allowed". 

[KyL]

That's not really an issue. What you just need is the ability to paint texture and export them. You will have to do the shaders in Terragen anyway...

[zaxxon]

It's great to see more conversation about partnering Speedtree with TG. Since IDV released version 7 of the Studio Modeler the ability to create "cages" and work with quad polygons the pipeline to programs like ZBrush and Mudbox (and others) has really been simplified and expanded:           

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrGt27UIPxk

More on that:        http://blog.speedtree.com/2013/11/subdivision-surface-modeling-speedtree-cinema-studio-v7/

Also the modified mesh can then be imported back into ST and 'embedded' into the Speedtree Procedural Mesh (SPM) for further refinement:

http://docs.speedtree.com/doku.php?id=mesh_assets

The ST exported mesh does need to be UV'd before being imported back into ST, but as the most likely part of the tree to be 'sculpted' is the trunk(s) and major large branches, that's not a major task. The finer branches and twigs can then be re-incorporated with the embedded mesh(es) into one spm file. Darn Ulco, looks like this thread has raised this project on my 'to do' list priorities 

[Dune]

I didn't know the latter part, Doug, re-import. Have to try that as well. Yes, there's always something new to explore, I wish days were longer