@ Badger
Well, I have my exams at university coming up and - just as Martin said - the weather is too good right now to sit at home in front of a screen
But I will find more time in the coming weeks to get in-depth with some things.
For the mean time, I almost finished the chamomile. The great thing is that you can "extract" certain parameters from your node network and build a custom interface at the top-most level that can help to control several aspects of a plant easily. I think I mentioned this concept in the other plant thread in a discussion with Martin. If you use the plant in Vue, this custom interface will be "included" with the species and can be accessed by double-clicking on it which is very cool. And even if you want to create plants for other applications, it is really easy to achieve new variations with these self-made controls.
For the chamomile, I built a custom interface with the following options:
- adjust plant health with a slider (from healthy blossoms to withered blossoms)
- adjust the blossom's closeness (from fully open to fully closed)
- adjust the distribution of open, closed and withered blossoms in general
- add seeds to the pistil for close ups (as a standard I set the parameter to 0 so that you can add seeds to individual "hero" plants without overloading a population of flowers with millions of invisible seeds)
- adjust the seed type (whole seeds, "hollow" seeds, seeds already eaten by insects)
- adjust the resolution for each seed type individually
Thus, the plant is both suitable for populations and for close ups, all while being fully user adjustable.
I did a macro shot with the new pistil detail, see the attachement. It was rendered in Vue xStream with DoF. Some color correction, the vignette and some slight chromatic aberration in PS.
AND: I did not experience a single crash while working on this plant (about 20 hours so far).
I really love TPF so far, but I discovered that your exported Vue plant species also have DRM on them (no idea about exporting as an object, though). Somebody else cannot open a species created in TPF unless he/she bought/acquired the species through C3D which is a real shame. I wanted to give away the chamomile for free, sigh.
I posted in the official e-on TPF forum about this and I hope to receive an answer:
Quote
I finished a plant yesterday that I wanted to give away for free. My understanding of the EULA was that
1. you weren't allowed to SELL species outside of C3D and
2. that you weren't able to exchange the editable scene files with other people, except for the producer version.
However, it appears that also the exported TPF-species have DRM on them and are locked to the creator's licence, at least nobody else was able to load my created species into his or her copy of Vue. This really bothers me, because it means that giving away freebies is no longer possible, unless you want to become a "broker" at C3D just for giving something away for free.
I don't like the selling restriction to C3D in particular, but at least I understand the economic reasons behind it, even though I don't appreciate it. But freebies do not hurt anyone, neither e-on nor the creator. They are the best advertising campaign for TPF that you can imagine - people see what is possible and get excited for the software. Also, it is highly debatable that the files that YOU created yourself in the software that YOU bought from YOUR money have DRM added to them without YOU having any influence on this.
I highly advise e-on to rethink the position regarding DRM on TPF species. It is enough to state in the EULA that selling species outside of C3D was illegal. Nobody would take the risk of openly making money in a way that was clearly prohibited (read: in another store than C3D). You don't need to impose a "locked-to-licence-DRM" on top of that or you could give the creator at least a choice when exporting the species.
Freebies are a word-of-mouth-multiplicator for a software and it really hinders the spreading of the programme in the long run.
I'd love to get an official reply to this. Thanks
