No Mojo users that I know of except myself have taken up TG2 at least not any who previously did not use TG much. Why? There is a reason for this.
During my use of TG2 I came across three annoying problems. Two of which effect everybody even if they don't get heavily into functions but no doubt these problems will get improved. Ray traced shadow issues with displacements and spiky terrain or large displacements getting cut off at render time, especially at higher quality and scale of render. These problems do also exist in other apps to a lesser or greater degree. There are other things that will get improved in TG2. Render optimizing for example. All things that will improve in the future.
There is however another problem. The big issue in my opinion. The power fractal control or lack of it.
Mojo users have told me that they sent TG2 to the Recycle Bin or Trash (Mac) after testing it. Their words not mine. The first thing they will do when trying TG2 is hook up a power fractal. Then they will look for it's position input (nowhere to be seen). Then they'll wonder where the largest and smallest scale input is. The result scale input, the roughness input etc. Then they may wonder how they can domain distort the fractal. Not possible except with the warper which is very poor.
The general topic was brought up in December last year on this forum and part of my argument was backed up by Calyxa who is not just biased for Mojo since she was the support:
Quote from: calyxa on December 27, 2006, 05:17:10 PM
Quote from: efflux on December 27, 2006, 05:04:05 PM
I feel locked out of TG2. The shaders appear to be hard coded and we can't study internal networks. The strength of this upgrade is that we can get at the engine yet we have no info as to how to start using function nodes. In Mojo you just jump in and experiment which is cool. So you learn. You can see how everything works behind the standard UI but not so in TG2. This is a big weak point in my opinion and more info about editing function nodes needs to be supplied or better still some examples.
I agree with a lot of that and am looking forward to seeing more info on nodes and more examples.
Since then I have persevered and discovered that you can do a whole lot with nodes, including recreating more powerful fake stones. The voronoi thread says it all in what can be done beyond what some of the shaders do and I have gone further with altitude driven distorted noise stratas - this looks really cool but no distorted and altitude driven fractal. So all techniques used in Mojo can be used in TG2 except manipulation of the power fractal.
This is a core concept that destroys the chances of tapping into the wealth of knowledge from Mojo users. It was even suggested I write Mojo to TG2 tutorials. I could do this for many things but the power fractal is the sticking point.
The problem lies in the power fractal's lack of inputs to control various functions from other functions. Domain distortion being one powerful technique e.g. using another function to twist the fractal's position around.
I am finding myself using noises rather than fractals for many things and distorting the scales and domains of these with a fractal but not the other way around
As new basis functions get added to TG2, which I'm sure they will, this situation will get even more frustrating and even with every basis function Mojo has, TG2 would still be crippled.
For those of you who don't know about these techniques it is not so easy to explain. Mojo is the only other program with all this control but it is TG2's main competitor and now a frozen app that will become defunct if not redeveloped. No multi core, no GI, very poor UI, useless Mac version (yet Mac users still stick with it) amongst other things yet most users stick with it or simply don't do any landscape work anymore because TG2 can not supply the power of Mojo fractal control even despite the fact that TG2 has this underlying power. I can understandable this. Without a suitable app I'd prefer just to give up with procedural landscape and do something else until an app that can do it all properly appears. Yes, Mojo has the isosurfaces but that's besides the point here.
Here are some example pictures. The first is a scale distorted (with a power fractal) perlin noise for clouds done in TG2. Not bad. Clouds don't always need all the detail of a fractal:
Then we have the same technique for surface textures (voronoi noise this time). Again, pretty cool and I've used a colour gradient hack to get more than two colours. I now have similar looking strata functions:
Now look at this. It's a Mojo perlin ridge terrain built from a fractal but highly distorted by noise in it's position (the other way around from the above TG2 examples), not distorted in scale but kind of similar shapes are possible and you can distort a noise's position in TG2 if you want. You can use various maths functions in TG2 to get these kind of cliffs instead of a curve graph. However this terrain is impossible in TG2 due to the lack of controlling inputs on the power fractal. In this case no positioning input. You can not distort a fractal in this manner (as far as I know, maybe somebody can tell me otherwise - the warping function is totally limited) despite the fact that TG2 has a capability to do this but the user is stopped from doing it. Distorting a noise with a fractal for terrain (as you can do in TG2) will not give you all the fractal detail that you want:
Other than this issue TG2 is fantastic. Great UI, loads of endless functions can be built, GI, great atmospheric engine etc. There are a few other things that Mojo can do over TG2 but it also works vice versa. Not major issues like this lack of fractal control. TG2 does not have all the difficult to rectify fundamental faults and bugs of Mojo. Mojo users did not voice opinions and so the faults carried on.