A tree and grass question

#1 Ok for your grass question, the grass is simply translucent at the bottom so that it blends better with the color of the ground.

For the trees there are a few things you would have to do for them to work like you want. To get them to have billboard leaves is easy, just make billboards in your 3D program (blender, etc) and from what I remember, you must name them with a bb at the start of the name for them to work correctly as camera facing billboards. For example if you named them as leavesA, leavesB, leavesC, you must rename them to bbleavesA, leavesB, leavesC. Now I am not 100% sure about this so please do a google search just to make sure I am right.

Now if you want to get the trees to move when you drive a car into them or depending on how windy the scene is, I can only think of using PhysX.
Torque 3D comes with a demo of the PhysX library set up. To get this working in your game all you would need to do is generate your game from this demo using the tool box. This however won't stop you from needing to do a fairly large amount of programming to get all the physics objects working the way you want. You will need to have a large knowledge of the physx library as well.

#2 apparently the Forest Kit is supposed to also include a method such as your are asking about with tree and wind effects. No details have been commited to on what else it will entail as far as grass or even trees.

#3 K, thank you for your replies. I will probably do some google search, just to be sure, asa you said. I'm very sorry that there isn't a software like speedtree at a lower price :(

#4 Well actually what I think is just as effective as speed tree, is you purchase the sticks and twigs pack, and then hook it up to the forest kit. The sticks and twigs pack was created with speed tree I believe so it is the closest you can get with out spending loads of money on it :)

#5 WOW, looks very good, I think maybe as good as speedtree. But...as I saw, this pack includes just some models of plants and trees and other environment stuff. What is forest kit all about, I mean what you can do with it? Can you modify some paramenters to make random trees for exampple, do you have some control over the branches, trunk or leafes, can yoou plug the forest kit into t3d and control the dynamics from T3D, or does the forest kit or the above mentioned pack (stiks and twigs) come with some dynamic features in them that make life much more easier for a artist that doesn' have programming knowledge? O, and what is the price or will be of this packs? Sorry for asking so many things, but I need to prevent some problems and difficulties that may appear in our developing process. After a complete evaluation of T3d demo, I will buy a proffesional licenses to work with that and in the near future probably a few more.

#6 I am not too sure about how the forest kit, works but i am guessing that you can use any shape files you want. You may be able to specify them in editor, but more likely you will write a datablock for them. Datablocks are very easy for even an artist with no programming skill to write up in a matter of seconds and the in game editor can help with the tweaking.

Sticks and Twigs is just a model pack, more info can be found here I don't know of anywhere you can get info on the forest kit so i can't help there.

As for Physics of the trees, you are never going to get a simple way of doing them. The forest kit may come with some demo physics but you are still going to need some programming no matter what.