As GroIMP's primary purpose is the modelling of three-dimensional virtual plants, GroIMP's 3D facilities play a prominent role. They are made available by the 3D plugin and contain the following features:
3D geometry objects: Spheres, cones and other primitives, NURBS curves and various kinds of NURBS surfaces, heightfields.
Materials can be assigned to objects to produce a variety of shading effects in visualization. Materials are defined using a shading network: This establishes a data flow through the nodes of the network which finally leads to the visible material properties like colour and opacity. Several kinds of nodes are available: Image maps, procedural maps, transformations. You can freely mix them in the shading network, which gives you great flexibility in defining materials.
An integrated viewer displays the current scene in three dimensions. Easy navigation is enabled by navigation buttons; objects can be selected in the viewer. Currently, the viewer supports a simple wireframe representation on all Systems. An OpenGL-based representation is available for Systems where the Java Binding for the OpenGL API (JOGL) is installed.
External renders can be used to create a 3D view of higher quality. The POV-Ray Plugin provides a scene export to the POV-Ray format which makes it possible to use the free ray-tracer POV-Ray as an external renderer, see the POV-Ray manual. The resulting image is directly shown in GroIMP's 3D view.