At the risk of disappointing some of you, I think it's important to be clear about our priorities and focus for TG2 as a product. TG2 is first and foremost a landscape modelling and rendering application. The support of objects is included largely to allow the significant increase in realism and the establishment of scale that comes from the use of natural objects such as rocks and vegetation. Although by its nature it supports arbitrary objects, including houses, vehicles, even human characters, that is admittedly not our primary focus, and although object support will most definitely improve in the future, the focus will remain on the needs of vegetation and other natural object phenomena. You are for example unlikely to ever see a Planetside-developed Poser import system, simply because supporting complex human figures within a landscape scene is not a particular aim of product. In general even the current object support is adequate for the majority of vegetation objects, which seldom include more than 16 textures, although of course object manipulation is still not ideal even for this more limited range of object types.
On the one hand you could say we are overlooking a large part of the market in keeping our focus narrow, because many people do want to include figures and other complex objects in their scenes, and those people will not consider TG2 as seriously. From our perspective, with limited development resources and time, we must necessarily focus on that with which we can most readily and significantly differentiate ourselves from our competitors. TG2 would not be a relevant product at all were it not able to create and render landscapes that exceed the quality or flexibility available in other applications. If Vue or other products were superior in all respects already then I would not expect to see anyone here bothering to use TG2. We believe, like you our existing users and supporters, that the problem of realistic landscape modeling and rendering is not yet solved, and that TG2 offers something unique and valuable in the market. It is due precisely to that more specific focus - on landscape creation and rendering - that TG2 does excel in certain key areas. Broadening our focus would only diminish our ability to stand-out in our real areas of expertise.
You could certainly discuss at length where to "draw the line" on support of other features - object import and rendering, animation, particle systems, simulation (cloth, fluids, etc.) - but ultimately a line must indeed be drawn. In the end Planetside's focus will always be on serving the core needs of the landscape market most effectively, with the aim of producing the most realistic output and, by extension, the most capable (and flexible) system for doing so.
For those of you interested in object support rest assured that our plans do include better object support, including a greater number of textures, etc. However modeling features, and likely even advanced object-based materials editing, will be limited to what - if anything - is valuable for the creation of realistic natural landscapes, and that which cannot be much more effectively accomplished in other programs. In other words, and by way of example, if you can successfully model and texture a figure in another program and then export all material definitions in a format that we can easily read and support in rendering, then we will support the loading and rendering of that object, but not modeling, and to a lesser degree complex material definition.
By definition there are many things that are either very difficult or impossible to support, such as proprietary procedural formats or other proprietary data. This is the main reason we won't be directly supporting Poser any time soon. If a Poser figure can be fully exported, with all material definitions and textures, into a standard object format such as OBJ, then TG2 should fully support accurate rendering of it in the future. The same is true for the object export from any application. We will work to support standard formats and expect other applications to do the same, in the spirit of data exchange and facilitating effective workflows.
For those who feel like this level of support is not enough, I think the answer is simply to work with several applications. While this can be seen as a limitation of TG2, on the other hand it can be looked at as simply using the right tool for the job. Making an application that is "all things to all people" has resulted in enormously complex packages like Maya and Max, which cost many thousands of dollars, and still are still not capable of producing realistic landscape scenes as easily or fully as TG2. It is due to our narrower focus that TG2 can do these things, and at a much lower cost. So if object
manipulation and rendering are of paramount importance to you, work with a program that more fully supports those functions.
For our part we will work to better support data interchange and seamless, easy combination with other applications, so that you can create a landscape in TG2 and a model in Maya, Max, etc. and render them separately but end up with an integrated, seamless image, wether a still or animation. It is a fundamental necessity for TG2 that this be possible and relatively easy as one of our main markets is the effects industry, who you can rest assured do not look to Vue or other landscape-focused products for primary object rendering. The vast majority of effects industry production pipelines that result in a finished frame for a movie or TV program involve several applications working closely together to achieve the best results. Our aim with TG2 is to fit comfortably into such a pipeline and fulfill the landscape rendering needs of professionals and hobbyists alike.
Quote from: DeathTwister on December 30, 2007, 12:34:33 PM
Oh any thought of Bones, IK and bringing in Animation information to Characters and object animation info with DSQ's for mesh or IFL for textures in animation features for tgd2? I do not need right now, but before years end of 08 I will if any Dev on that, it would be nice to know as I have seen nothing to that aspect yet in tgd2. Thanks Oshyan you da man. Sorry if I am such a pain bro, but have a need to know. Trying to plan out a huge Project in TGD2 and Models, texturing and so on have me stumped on time lines and or work arounds.
DT
DeathTwister
I think the answer to this follows from the above discussion. Providing tools for setting up complex object animation, such as Inverse Kinematics, bones, etc. is really outside of the focus of TG2 and is very unlikely to be supported in the future. However import of "baked" animation information from other programs, that can be associated with an imported model for animation, may at some point be supported. Object translation and orientation is much easier to handle for animation and is our current focus, and even though that may be expanded in the future, ultimately any complex animation of an object should really be handled in a more purpose-built application. Compositing that output with TG2 imagery is a workflow we will be improving and better supporting in the future.
- Oshyan
