The reason I brought up the Vue forum is it (theoretically) demonstrates the amount of discussion that happens (or happened) there, which justified its own area for said discussion. I keep an eye on CGTalk as you might imagine and there's very little TG discussion by comparison. As I said it may be a "chicken and egg" thing, but I honestly don't know how to solve the community side of the equation (i.e. why people aren't discussing it) besides just increasing the user base, as we of course always strive to do. Interestingly Photoshop and Corel Painter share a forum over there, two similar but actually fairly different applications from different publishers, and Adobe Photoshop in particular being a major app, you would assume it would have its own forum. Given that precedent, it almost makes more sense to have a "Landscape Renderers" discussion forum than a dedicated Vue one...
Regarding PR, as far as I've seen none of the software publishers really get preferential treatment in the articles, the focus is squarely on the production team and the project details. Software is often mentioned, but generally only in passing. TG has been mentioned in at least 2 articles, one about Parnassus and one about GI Joe. I think it also depends who they end up talking to on the production side. If it's one of the studios using TG, they'll likely mention it, as was the case with those two articles. I think the reality is there are so many studios working on each production and so many aspects to the visual effects in each film, that even an article "About visual effects in Sucker Punch" is unlikely to cover say TG, especially when they're only a few pages long. As far as I've seen Vue is not often mentioned either actually.
Where I do see a difference is in the handling of press releases. We do submit news to CGSociety when appropriate, but actual "articles" like this one (from a press release) about Vue 10 don't happen:
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/vue_10It may well be that we're just not submitting things to the right place or in the right way, or there may be promotional dollars involved. We'll see what happens with the 2.4 release for TG2...
In any case I'm not saying there's no bias there, but I suspect if there is it's confined to a very few people who happen to have stronger influence over the gallery selection, and I think in general they are not terribly open to tools that are not both "professional" and "popular". I think it would be hard to argue now that TG is not "professional", but how "popular" it is could be debated based on its presence (or lack thereof) on the CGS forums in general discussion. Hopefully as we work to increase TG's visibility and market share that will change organically. I don't see another way to do it, besides efforts from some of the passionate TG users here who do occasionally pipe up over there, which is certainly appreciated. The important thing, I think, is to maintain a positive approach.
- Oshyan