Gärtnerei Simulator blog

Plumbago, my favorite blue

2026-10-15T12:00:00+02:00

When it comes to blue, the plumbago is my all-time favorite. I don't know a more beautiful blue. It flowers all summer long and into the fall, and it's the first plant in the game with blue flowers. Just like the creeping zinnia, I built it without an old model, from photos and videos of real plants.

The flower

Each flower is a thin tube with a flat star of five petals. At first the petals were pointed, then wider but still angular. I wanted them more delicate, so they got rounded tips and an almost white edge.

From pointed to angular to delicate.

After that they still looked too smooth and too stiff to me. Now every flower looks a little different: sometimes bigger, sometimes more tilted, with a slightly wavy edge and tips that curl back.

On the left smooth, on the right every flower with its own shape.

A flower cluster starts out as a green spike and opens from the bottom up.

From the green spike to full bloom.

The plant

The first version was too sparse and looked prickly. With denser foliage, flatter leaves and a few shoots hanging over the rim of the pot, it finally looked like a real plumbago.

Growing works like it does for the other plants: first the shoots come, the young leaves travel up with the tip, and at the end the flowers open.

The plumbago from young plant to bloom.

On a trellis

The plumbago likes to climb. That's why you can also get it on a trellis in the game: on a pyramid made of bamboo sticks, on a fan and on a single stick. After the climbing rose, it's the second plant you can get on a trellis.

Pyramid, fan and stick.

Glow in the sun

In the sun, the flowers of a real plumbago glow almost translucent. I wanted that in the game too. The plumbago is the first plant where sunlight shines through the flowers.

On the left without, on the right with glow.

In the game

The blue plumbago has been in the game since October 3, and since October 5 it also comes in white. Both colors are available as a bush and on a trellis.

White and blue.

The trellis forms on the planting table.

Questions or comments? Feel free to write to me at info@gaertnerei-simulator.de.

Creeping zinnia, my favorite yellow summer bloomer

2026-10-10T12:00:00+02:00

The creeping zinnia is one of my favorite plants. It flowers all summer long, for months and with countless small yellow flowers. It grows a little slower than other summer flowers, but it's a great plant for full sun and does well in partial shade too. Its botanical name is Sanvitalia procumbens, and the variety in the game is called 'Aztekengold'.

My first attempt was to bring the creeping zinnia into the game with Gaussian splatting, a 3D capture made from lots of individual images. But that cost too much performance, and there was no way to make a capture like that grow. So I built the plant from scratch instead, this time without any old model, just from my photos.

The real plants

My reference was creeping zinnias from a nursery. I bought them, photographed them and then rebuilt them in 3D.

A young plant and two fully grown creeping zinnias from the nursery.

A photo has no scale, but a pot does. I measured everything against the pot rim, a good twelve centimeters across: height, width and the size of the leaves and flowers. Like the plants from the nursery, the finished plant has around 20 open flowers.

From above you can see how dense the cushion is and how the flowers are spread across it.

The flower

Each creeping zinnia flower has a greenish-yellow disc in the middle with a ring of about thirteen yellow petals around it. Sounds simple. But it took several stages before the flower looked like the ones in my photos.

At first it was all about how the petals sit on the disc. In the first attempt they ran into the centre as narrow strips, with wedge-shaped gaps between them all the way down to the disc. In the second they were joined too far out and looked like a stiff wreath. Only in the third were they joined just at the base and free towards the tips.

On the left a real flower, on the right my flower after the first attempts.

Now the shape was right, but every petal was the same length, the same width, and lay neatly in one plane. No real flower looks like that. So in the next stage I offset the petals in their orientation. Each one is a little longer or shorter, wider or narrower, shifted to the side, slightly twisted and cut at an angle. On top of that each one is raised or lowered a little, which gave the flower depth. Every flower in the game has its own mix of this, so no two look the same.

The petals offset in their orientation and with depth, still with pointed tips.

Then I found the tips too angular. Each petal ended in two corners, as if cut off with scissors. I gave it a third point at the tip and moved the corners back a little and towards the middle. The first try wasn't enough and looked like a flat roof, the second one rounded the petal off nicely.

Angular tips on the left, rounded ones on the right.

This is the finished flower, offset, with depth and rounded tips.

The finished flowers, each with its own shape.

Just like with the geranium, opening up is only a deformation of the same flower. It starts as a small green bud with a yellow tip, then opens into a yellow cup and finally becomes almost flat.

A flower opening up.

The shape of the plant

My first complete plant was far too sparse. The flowers sat on long stalks above a thin layer of leaves, and from above the whole thing looked like a star. After that I made it denser step by step until it was as bushy as in the photos.

The first, fourth, seventh and ninth version.

In the end, the trailing shoots took the most work. At first the flower at the tip hung downwards, as if the shoot had snapped. Real creeping zinnias turn their tips back up, though. After that the flower pointed upwards, but the shoots were far too long and stuck out way past the pot. In the ninth version they drape over the edge just behind the rim, hang down a short way and then lift the tip with the flower, just like in the photos.

And because real plants are never identical, every plant in the game has its own number of trailing shoots, anywhere from none to five.

Sometimes five trailing shoots, sometimes one, sometimes none.

The finished plant has 22 flowers, 27 buds and 278 leaves. At 6,740 vertices it's a little bigger than the geranium, but in my test setup it doesn't cost any measurable extra rendering time.

Growing

Growth follows the same rule as with the geranium. Only the finished plant is built, and everything before it is created by making it smaller and folding it up. The creeping zinnia starts out really small, at just under three centimeters with a few young pairs of leaves. That fits, because in the seed tray the little plants are tiny at first.

At the start there's hardly anything to see.

Then the shoots grow out, the pairs of leaves unfold, and before the halfway point of growth the first flowers open. Finally the trailing shoots drape over the rim.

The creeping zinnia from young plant to bloom.

In the game

The creeping zinnia has been in the game since October 1. You buy it as young plants in a seed tray and pot them up on the planting table.

Young plants from the seed tray go into the pots.

It counts as a trailing plant and needs only a little water. It doesn't like too much water, and the plant panel tells you so.

On the right the plant's values, in the back an employee waters the next table.

A few days later the young plants have turned into a table full of yellow flowers.

Fully grown and ready to sell. On the right the values of the plant in hand.

What's next

After the verbena, the creeping zinnia was the second plant that didn't have any old model at all. Since then I build almost all new plants this way, from photos and sometimes from videos of real plants. Next time I'll tell you about the plumbago. When it comes to blue, it's my all-time favorite, I don't know a more beautiful blue. It's the first plant in the game with blue flowers and one of the first you can also get on a trellis.

A little preview of the next post: the plumbago.

Questions or comments? Feel free to write to me at info@gaertnerei-simulator.de.

The geranium that learned to grow

2026-10-03T10:05:00+02:00

If you run a nursery, you get to watch your plants grow. For a long time, that wasn't possible in Gärtnerei Simulator. A geranium was either a young plant, half-grown or fully grown, and between those stages the game simply swapped one model for another. That had been bugging me for a while, and in this post I'll tell you how I changed it.

Visiting a research nursery

It all started early this year with a visit to an experimental and research nursery. I photographed and filmed young and slightly older geraniums there and captured them as Gaussian splats. Those are 3D captures made from lots of individual images that you can later look at from every side on your computer.

Young geraniums at the experimental and research nursery.

What interested me most were the plants halfway there. Not the finished geranium in full bloom, but everything that comes before it.

Photographed from above, a look into the greenhouse, and seed trays with freshly sprouted seedlings.

The first models

These captures became my first three geranium models, one for each growth stage: a young plant, a half-grown plant after about four to six weeks, and a fully grown, flowering plant after eight to twelve weeks. Each model was a single mesh with a texture on top, a bit like a 3D scan. Leaves, stems and flowers weren't separated from each other.

The three old models, young plant, half-grown and fully grown, here in coral.

In the game, each plant on the table was shown as one of these models, depending on its growth stage.

This is how it used to look, with one fixed model per growth stage.

It looked decent, but it had two drawbacks. The models were heavy. The flowering soft pink geranium had 6,851 vertices, the corner points the graphics card uses to build the shape. Because the texture was cut into many pieces and the model had lots of hard edges, that turned into a good 24,000 in the game, since the graphics card has to duplicate points along those edges. On a full planting table, that adds up quickly. And the plants couldn't grow either. They just jumped from one model to the next.

That's how it stayed for months. It worked, but I was never really happy with it.

How I found VAT

The spark came from the game Leafy Corner. By then I already had most of my plant models, but when I saw the plants there, I wanted mine to look that good too. My plants should grow like real ones, with new leaves that appear small and folded and open up bit by bit. And it had to run smoothly with lots of plants at once.

While researching, I came across Vertex Animation Textures, VAT for short. I suspect Leafy Corner might do something similar, and that's the path I took.

With VAT, you calculate the growth once in advance in Blender and store it in a texture. For every vertex of the plant, it records where that point sits at which moment, and in the game the graphics card reads the right shape from it. That way hundreds of geraniums can share one model and still each be at a different stage of growth.

The first attempt

In mid-September I started my first experiments in Blender. Technically, the first prototype came together surprisingly quickly. It had 33 intermediate stages, ran in Unity and handled 1,000 geraniums at once in a test. It just didn't look like a geranium.

On the left the old model, on the right my first attempt with the new technique.

The leaves lay on top of each other like a flat, even wreath, and the flower stalks stuck out way too far.

Leaf by leaf

So I started with a single leaf. There were three shapes to choose from: soft, wavy and folded. I went with the wavy one and mixed in a few folded ones, because real geranium foliage isn't smooth. It has waves and little folds.

Three leaf shapes to choose from: soft, wavy and folded.

From that came a new fully grown geranium with 26 leaves. The older, bigger ones sit on the outside and hang down a little, the young ones sit on top. Then there are two compact flower clusters and a nodding cluster of buds. In a second round the leaves got fine veins, a bit of color variation and the darker band that gives the zonal geranium its name. The individual flowers became rounder and the buds plumper.

On the left the old geranium, in the middle the new shape, on the right the same shape after the second round.

The flowers up close. The first individual flowers were still angular, later they became rounder.

In the game the new geranium gets by with around 4,500 vertices. The old flowering one had a good 24,000.

Learning to grow

For the growth I deliberately kept things simple. I only build the finished, flowering plant. Everything before that is created by making exactly this plant smaller and folding it up, a bit like a film played backwards. So a young leaf is the same leaf as later on, just tiny and folded along its midrib. Over time it grows out of its stalk and unfolds. The flowers start as closed buds and open from the outside in.

A leaf unfolding.

A flower cluster from a ball of buds to an open bloom.

It took four attempts before it looked natural. In the first, the plant started as a flat rosette instead of a young plant, and the closed flowers stuck out on long little stalks. The whole thing looked like a dandelion clock.

In the second attempt it finally started as a young plant, with sturdy shoots and five flower stalks that already carried their first buds halfway through growth. But now the big body of the plant grew straight out of the soil instead of out of the young plant.

In the third, it came out of the young plant's first fork. Only now too many leaves shot out at once at the beginning.

In the fourth, one leaf came after another, more slowly at first. Nothing sprouts from the lower part of the young plant, since that part sits in the soil. And the leaf stalks grow upwards in an arc, so young leaves appear at the top and only sink lower later. That's when I was happy with it.

At the beginning, new leaves and side shoots sprout from the young plant one after another.

The soft pink geranium from young plant to bloom.

In the game

On September 24 the first growing geranium stood on the planting table in the game, a soft pink one. It doesn't change how the game plays. There are still three growth stages, and you still have to keep your plants going with water and fertilizer. But now you see them grow without any jumps. If you neglect your geraniums, you'll still see it on them, and in co-op everyone at the table sees the same plant at the same stage.

A game day in time-lapse. The table of soft pink geraniums comes into bloom, with the plant's care values on the right.

For the graphics card, the growing geranium costs hardly more than the old models in my test setup. I still have to measure it in the finished game on different computers.

More varieties

After that, things moved fast. Over the next few days coral, pink, white, white pink and hot pink joined in. Each variety has its own shape with its own flower stalks, leaf color and size, but grows by the same rules. To keep a table from looking copy-pasted, plants of the same variety differ too. One is a little bigger or smaller, another has its stalks turned differently, another has one side stalk more or less.

Four of the six varieties, from left soft pink, pink, coral and white.

The coral geranium from young plant to bloom.

The coral one also comes in three leaf variations, and each plant on the table is assigned one of them for good.

The coral geranium in its first shape and in three more leaf variations.

Not every variety worked out right away. For the white one I put versions with three and four open flower clusters side by side and went with four.

On the left the old model, next to it the new white geranium with three and with four open flower clusters.

What's next

Following the geranium's example, petunias, verbenas, creeping zinnias, French marigolds, fuchsias, New Guinea impatiens and roses now grow the same way. For most of them there wasn't even an old model, just photos and videos of real plants. With the creeping zinnia, for example, I offset the petals several times, gave them depth and made them rounder until the shape was right. I'll tell you about that in one of the next posts.

Creeping zinnia, on the left the flower heads in progress, on the right on the planting table in the game.

Questions or comments? Feel free to write to me at info@gaertnerei-simulator.de.

The blog is here

2026-10-03T10:00:00+02:00

Starting today, the website has a blog. I'll be writing about Gärtnerei Simulator in two categories.

Under News you'll find announcements, updates and dates. In the Dev blog I talk about how the game is made, for example how the plants grow, how the customers in your shop behave or how playing together in co-op works.

First up is a dev blog post about the geraniums: The geranium that learned to grow.

If you don't want to miss anything, you can subscribe to the blog via RSS feed. Like the rest of the website, the blog works without cookies and without tracking.

Questions, wishes or ideas for topics? Feel free to write to me at info@gaertnerei-simulator.de.