Trees

[Bluestorm]

Hi Martin (please call me Daniel ),

thank you so much for your constructive reply. Unfortunately, I do not have the time right now to go into detail with the questions that you posted, but I will do so later and also supply screenshots so that things get clearer

Anyways, we are on the same page with a lot of things, as it appears I fully believe that you had bad communication with e-on, this is not the first time that I have heard about that. However, all I can say from personal experience is that I for one cannot complain about their support (which I am really glad about ).

Anyways, I will get back to you (and everyone else) later this day or weekend and will answer your questions in as much detail as I can

All the best from sunny Munich

Daniel

Edit: For the time being, here is a testrender of a leaves closeup, rendered in Vue 11. Of course, it doesn't look very good. The leaves are not properly arranged or correctly attached to the branches, many of them are flat etc. But it was just a quick test for single leaves instead of billboards. Each of these leaf objects can be curled, twisted, rotated and displaced and thus be made to look "fully" 3D.

The second image is a trunk test. The texture is one that I took with my camera and that I then made seamless in Photoshop. I created a displacement map in Shadermap from the photo and used it on the trunk. Not too bad I think.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Daniel,

Take the time you need. It's too good weather to stay inside! I'm on my way to the beers now

8 sec rendertime on the 2nd...pfff...would take (2?) order(s?) of magnitudes longer in TG at this resolution and detail.

About the leafs; it looks like some aren't connected to a branch/twig?
Secondly, and most important, they don't seem to have any kind of tropism. In other words the orientation of the leafs is too random. If you look at the leafs of oaks and many trees you'll see they don't have that ubermuch variation and all have similar orientation towards to the sun, of course with a healthy degree of randomness.

Does TPF provide tropism controls?

[Bluestorm]

Actually, all of them are connected, but I made the diameter of the last level of branches way too thin, they are almost invisible.

You are right about the direction and orientation issue. e-on provides seperate options for horizontal and vertical tropism. You can finetune these settings for each node individually or globally for the entire tree.

As I said, it was just a quick test without any sort of parameter modifications. I just wanted some single leaves to appear on the tree and see what it looked like.

Edit: And this is what you get when you combine the branches of a platanus tree with banana leaves 

[rcallicotte]

Thanks Daniel.  Great to see what it looks like.  Nice tree bark on the trunk!

Hope everyone gets this sorted out during the time period for the sale.  It looks good enough to me and I have hope that e-On developers will do what is useful for the end user just as I trusted Matt and company here to get things moving forward like Terragen has - one of the best outdoor rendering software packages available.

I love the Planetside forums!

[TheBadger]

No one any place said that it did not look like great software. The anger is all coming from the prices and versions.

I read that link. They don't say too much. But it is an acknowledgment.

I would say I would buy the soft (OSX) at the sale price, now. If, they publicly promised, in detail, whatever the hell it is they are really going to do. They need to answer all of the questions before the sale is over. Because at 1000-1500. No. It would be stupid to buy it especially for OSX (site unseen) Not even a beta to play with. It is an especially shady deal if your buying the OSX version.

People keep posting in those forums and threads that peoples complaints are too emotional or flat out mean. But I think if it were not for the very angry feedback, nothing would be done about what it is people are complaining about.
e-on clearly did not expect such feelings. And they clearly are concerned. Good! They should be concerned. Their reputation is on the line. And it does not mater that its great software (assuming that its as good as they say, and as it looks) The pricing/version  structure is dishonest and manipulative.

Obviously this software is desired. People want it. Their angry because they cant have it. Or what they can have, won't do what the previews made them think it would, what they thought the soft would let them do. And that is entirely e-on's own fault.
I know I was getting very excited about the release. So I don't think the anger is misplaced or overboard. I think they attempted to take advantage of early positive feedback and got bit in the backside... Good. Learn from it and do better.

But Im not rushing out to buy, just because its on sale. They need to address ALL of the questions and complaints with definitive answers. And they need to make certain promises on the things like OSX.

It was not just a screwed up role out. It was shady.

[efflux]

@Efflux
I like your plant at the top of this page. That has some real potential! Looking forward to your TG renders man.
You should talk to your open source communities and encourage them to develop a fee open source speedtree/plantfactory soft! That would be huge ;)y to tell?

I've already been on the Wings3d forum and I posted a link to that black and white image and told them that Wings has great potential along this angle. I also told them how much E-on wants for plant Factory.

I'm gradually making progress here. It's all a bit complicated to explain but Wings also gives me ways to fix up trees coming from Arbaro. It's pure fluke luck that Arbaro is creating the trees in a way that Wings can grab just about any component by selection analysis. There is a fall down with Blender though which has a total cludge of a way of dealing with hard edges. However, Wings and Modo play together like heaven.

I can't explain everything here but there is giant potential to keep progressing this to get decent trees really fast. Wings is key because of it's superb selection power.

Heres another Arbaro tree. Rendered in Blender (just because I can do that - I need to mess further with Modo's rendering).

[TheBadger]

@Efflux
Nice going! You seem to make very fast progress. little jealous of that. I make great use of the information I gain, but it takes me forever just to  make my self even sit down to do the learning. Not to mention the learning part.

On the open source trees, let us know if you see any fires get stated anywhere on that.

@Bluestorm
Those are pretty, no doubt. And given that you say you did it in a short time, thats all the more impressive. But did I read you say that the version you have can or can not export polygons? And at any rate, can you render this same tree in maya/max, TG2, and the others? If you have time this weekend will you please post a TG2 render here with PF trees. And if you use other soft like I mentioned, a render from them.
As you already know and the view number for this thread show, there is a lot of strong interest. Certainly for me too.

Its a little bit troubling that you are are providing the needed information and not the software makers, but I'm real glad to get the info!

[efflux]

I've got another test where I'm experimenting with welding the first level of branches onto the trunk. That's why I cut the branches off but this could be way better. I'm not too happy with it. I should have made the root part better. Next tests will be with leaves. There is something about the way Arbaro positions leaves which seems good. I've found another open source app which can handle leave shaping much better. They key to why I'm even bothering with this though is Wings. Wings can deal with sorting the trees the way I want. I could add seriously good textures to the trunks in 3D Coat but I know that is part is reasonably straightforward as long as I can knock the trees into some general shape first. I can't get massive detail like some of these Plant Factory trees but then again I can make decent trees with low poly counts. I'll certainly be upping the amount of detailing though.

[Zairyn Arsyn]

i agree with Badger, that tree looks good, nice lighting and shading, (on the leaves)

[Bluestorm]

@ calico

Thanks for the compliment

@ efflux

Wow, this tree looks really good Well done.

@ TheBadger

I will render a plant in Terragen 2 and C4D, no problem This is everything I have access to (besides Vue). And yes, you can export plants as *.3ds, *.obj and *.fbx in the pre-release which is what I did for the Vue render (the direct link to Vue is not yet active in the beta version). There are some bugs when exporting trees right now such as a missing triangle here and there, but e-on already said that they know about this and that it will be fixed in the final release. For more information on features and stuff, read on

@ Martin

Ok, Martin, I will try to answer all of your questions as thoroughly as possible. However, I cannot compare the Plant Factory to Speedtree because I've never used it. I own XFrog both as a standalone and as a plugin for C4D, though, and have some experience with it. So if there should arise any questions regarding comparability with XFrog, I might be able to partly answer those.

First, you were surprised that I thought 300 € were a good price. Well, I really think it is. It is on par with XFrog (not counting the current summer sale) but the Plant Factory can do more in its studio version than XFrog. So yes, I think the pre-release offer is a good value. And in any case, if I will ever upgrade to producer, I will only have paid so much in total because I already got the studio version 60% off.

I hope the OpenGL view will be ported to Vue 12. The current view is ok, but Vue could definitely benefit from an improvement. Admittedly, with Ecosystem instances and all that stuff, there is a lot more workload for the graphics card in Vue compared to TPF.

You are right that posting the image of the 3D tree removed the uncertainty, which of course is a good thing. My point was that the users simply didn't take the time to look at the plants' setup, even though it was pretty obvious in the first place

You can load objects from other 3D packages into TPF, there's a special "Object"-node for that. I also think that they will customize the UI further to remove the greyed-out features, because that's the way they handle it with the different Vue versions. I'd be surprised if they went down the "lazy route" after all this criticism.

Regarding rendering, you can do a proper preview inside TPF, but it is very uncomfortable. If you want to get a picture with a larger resolution, you have to resize the 3D view which automatically changes the image aspect ratio, too. E-on should at least enable the option to select the desired render resolution. I can live with the limitation of not being able to adjust render settings. After all, I use Vue or any other package for rendering and TPF for modeling. The resolution thing bothers me, though.

Here are three screenshots to illustrate what I meant with "extracting parameters". Vue has the ability to "publish" sliders and fields from a node directly into the material or object editor so that you don't have to dive into the complex node network every time you want to adjust a parameter of a function.



This screenshot shows the complex node setup of a Vue rock material and one parameter that was published to the top-level under the name "amount". The next screenshots shows what this looks like in Vue's material editor. Basically, you get a seperate tab with all your published controls, so you can create your own, unique material and shader interfaces in addition to the standard controls.



The plant factory was said to feature this function for plant creation as well. This means you should be able to select certain parameters from your nodes such as diameter, angle, width, length etc. and "publish" them as a seperate interface that can then be accessed in Vue's rudimentary plant editor. The next screenshot depicts the current plant editor in Vue and the possibilites to modify a Solid Growth plant. My expectation is that you will be able to build your own, custom interface for later editing in the plant editor by publishing parts of your node network as seperate controls. However, it appears that this will only be possible in the producer version. Do you now understand what I meant?



@ everyone

I attached a screenshot of the current interface of TPF so that you can take a look at it. Also, I created screenshots of ALL the available nodes and options in the studio pre-release. You can take a look at the huge image here: http://vuescapes.homepage.t-online.de/tpf/tpf_nodes.jpg . I guess there's plenty of information for you in there

[TheBadger]

Thank you! Im sure those pics will at least keep me busy this weekend.

One last question from me for the day.

What is the situation with UVs. How do you find them to be. And with regard to your other soft, when you test, please take note of any issues that arise with the UVs and let us know. Specifically, I would like you know what you find when you view the texture nodes with-in the object, in TG2.

I simply don't recall any discussion in those other forums or pages on the topic.

Cheers

[rcallicotte]

@Daniel - Hey!  Thanks for the screenshots, especially of the Plant Factory - reminds me of SpeedTrees interface some. 

@Badger - Guess how I got into TG2?  I was one of the first people here on the forums for TG2 (not so much on TG, but some) and did a pre-purchase.  The pre-purchase software was absolutely nothing like it is now, but it was great working with this Planetside team and getting to know everyone here, while the software improved month by month, year by year.  I was able to get in on that, but it also meant I got a discount on TG2 because it was a pre-purchase.  This is what is happening with Plant Factory and now might be a good time to consider it (before next Monday), if you decide to consider other points of view rather than those less than gracious toward e-On.  I think we're in for a treat, myself.

[Bluestorm]

@ calico

You're welcome

@ TheBadger

I will keep an eye on the UVs and will give you a notice.

@ all

Seems like e-on was indeed listening. Nicholas Phelps just posted the following blog post:

Hello everyone,

We are pleased to announce Phase II of The Plant Factory Studio pre-release.  As part of this release we will be revising several aspects of The Plant Factory Product Line:
Full Node and Graph Capabilities for Plant Factory Studio

Based on the feedback from the early adopters of Plant Factory Studio, we are lifting all graph and node restrictions for Plant Factory Studio.  Therefore, Plant Factory Studio will now include the full set of plant creation capabilities including the entire range of math, fractal, and noise nodes.  Users of TPF Studio can now create the same plants and models as the top-of-the-line TPF Producer product with full artistic freedom.
"Plant Factory Designer" Replaces "Plant Factory for Vue"

We are also reformulating the Plant Factory for Vue product with a new product called Plant Factory Designer.  Plant Factory Designer will include all the functionality of the Plant Factory for Vue product with the addition of static plant export in FBX, OBJ, and 3DS formats.   Plant Factory Designer retains the direct connection to Vue for generating fully animated plants inside of Vue 11+.
Plant Factory Studio Pre-Release II Available on Monday, June 10

Plant Factory Studio Pre-Release II will be available starting Monday, June 10.  All previous purchasers of Plant Factory Studio Pre-Release I (which will continue to be sold thru Sunday, June 9) will receive free updates that include the new functionality. Pricing for Plant Factory Studio Pre-Release II will be $595 for one week (a $400 discount over the cost of the release version).

Thank you, and you all have a wonderful week-end,

Nicholas Phelps

Source: http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/07/Plant-Factory-Studio-Pre-Release-Phase-II

[rcallicotte]

[Edit - Oh, I see it's already been announced here. Sweet  ]

HEY!  CHECK THIS OUT - http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/07/Plant-Factory-Studio-Pre-Release-Phase-II


The graph is now available in Studio!

[efflux]

Hi guys, I'm not following the Plant Factory talk but I'll probably investigate this in time. One thing I've found is that Wings recognises the fact that every part of every leaf in a tree is the same geometry. This means you can apply any geometry operation to a vertex, edge or face on one leaf and every leaf on the whole tree updates. Arbora doesn't create leaf stems, it leaves the leaves slightly off from the twig. Of ourse I can now change that. It's pretty taxing to do operations on thousands of leafs at one but it seems it works.

Arbora is the only free app that's any good. I've investigated that. Arbora actually outputs something which is a very useful base though.

Next phase is that I've got this great idea for texturing the leafs - if it works. Well, if it works it will actually be phenominal.