Details
AliveGrass by AionSky Studios
Feel the world beneath you.
Bring your airports and low-level flying environments to life with modeled 3D grass, flowers and small plants. AliveGrass adds vegetation around your active camera on suitable terrain in X-Plane 12, giving airport fields, grass strips and rural landscapes natural depth and variation.
From taxiing beside an airport meadow to approaching a landing spot in a helicopter, AliveGrass brings detail to the scenery closest to you. Vegetation follows cockpit, external and free-camera views, without requiring you to edit individual airports in WED.
Features
- 132 vegetation variations across 11 biome groups, with regional selection for airport grass, meadows, wetlands, coastal areas, alpine terrain, tundra, desert, tropical landscapes and scrub.
- Modeled 3D vegetation, with detailed nearby plants and simpler geometry for distant coverage.
- Terrain-aware placement, including shorter vegetation on eligible grass runways and suitable pavement verges.
- Scenery-based exclusions for recognized paved runways, taxiways, aprons, roads, water and buildings.
- Seasonal and weather-responsive appearances, including green, wet, dormant and snow-coated vegetation.
- Adjustable coverage from 20 to 2,000 metres around your camera.
- Independent controls for distant fullness, detailed plant budget and modeled height.
- Low, Balanced, Dense and Ultra presets to help tailor the experience to your system.
- Progressive camera-based streaming and smooth visibility transitions.
- Packages for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Improved preparation and rendering in v0.6.3
Version 0.6.3 focuses on preparing vegetation ahead of your travel path and reducing repeated processing and rendering work.
Predictive preparation builds coverage ahead of the aircraft, keeping prepared vegetation hidden outside your selected visible range. Background planning, cached terrain checks and revised loading schedules help manage vegetation preparation as you move.
Distant shared grass uses simpler modeled geometry to reduce rendering work, while nearby shared blades retain their detailed solid geometry.
Vegetation is static in v0.6.3. Wind, propwash, jet exhaust and rotor-driven movement have been removed. Seasonal appearances, weather responses, modeled height controls and smooth visibility transitions remain.
Seasons and weather
AliveGrass responds progressively to simulator date, hemisphere, approximate regional climate and surface conditions. Enjoy fresh green fields, warmer dormant vegetation, wet-weather appearances and snow-coated plants when simulated conditions support them.
Snow coverage depends on simulator surface conditions; cold temperatures alone do not guarantee snow. Seasonal and weather transitions occur gradually.
Coverage and visibility
Vegetation streams around your active camera, with naturally denser and sparser patches across suitable terrain. Your selected radius defines the surrounding area eligible for rendering; it does not guarantee uniformly dense grass across every surface.
Under the default camera-height rules, grass is fully visible through 25 metres above local ground level, then fades smoothly to zero at 100 metres. Grass is not rendered at or above 100 metres camera AGL. During descent, hidden preparation runs below 300 metres to help prepare coverage before it becomes visible.
These height rules also apply to external and free-camera views.
Performance
Adjustable coverage, distant fullness and plant budgets let you balance visual detail with performance. Larger coverage areas and higher density settings increase processing, rendering and memory demands.
In a controlled Apple Silicon Mac test at 2560 × 1052 with 2 km coverage on Balanced settings, a held ground-level side view measured approximately 23.9 FPS with grass visible and 28.9 FPS with its visibility toggle off—around a 5 FPS difference in that scene. The plugin remained loaded in both cases.
This measurement is a specific test result, not a guaranteed FPS cost. Actual performance depends on hardware, scenery, camera position and settings. Start with the supplied settings and adjust them to suit your system.
Scenery compatibility
Placement depends on available terrain and scenery information. Custom scenery may require additional checking, and pavement represented only in aerial imagery may not be recognized. Unresolved terrain may be excluded under strict placement settings, so coverage can vary between locations and scenery packages.
AliveGrass adds visual vegetation. It does not alter landing-gear physics or grass rolling resistance.
Aircraft, liveries, airports, trees and surrounding scenery shown in promotional screenshots are separate simulator content and are not included with AliveGrass.
Support: aionskystudios@gmail.com
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Requirements
Simulator: X-Plane 12, with scenery installed for the areas you intend to use.
Windows: Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Windows package is x64.
macOS: macOS 12 Monterey or newer. Includes Apple Silicon and Intel binaries.
Linux: An x86_64 distribution compatible with X-Plane 12.
Hardware: A system meeting X-Plane 12 requirements, with additional CPU, memory and graphics capacity for your selected vegetation settings.
Storage: Approximately 2.1 GB for the installed plugin. Allow additional free space for extraction and scenery indexing/cache.
Permissions: Write access to the plugin installation folder for settings and cache files.
Settings: Start with the supplied settings and adjust coverage, distant fullness and plant budget to suit your system. Higher settings, including the 2,000 m coverage radius, increase rendering and memory demands.
Activation: No serial number required.
With X-Plane closed, extract the appropriate platform package and copy the complete AliveGrass folder into:
X-Plane 12/Resources/plugins/
Launch X-Plane and open Plugins → AliveGrass by AionSky Studios to configure your settings.
See the included README.txt for installation, update instructions and scenery compatibility details.
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