Two major things about Vue... 1) Vue is now content-ware much like Daz Studio. So, they give you a restricted Vue 7 Pioneer version for free and you buy content for it produced by others through the Vue store. If you buy certain content (for enough money), Vue 7 becomes 'unlocked' (you get all of the features). 2) The basics provided in Vue 7 Pioneer are just that, basic. You cannot come close to producing a scene of the visual stunning that TG2 does out-of-the-box. There's also no way to produce a scene anywhere close to the farm image provided in this thread with the included objects given in the free version. I personally found its visual interface is not intuitive. I supposed after I worked with it for a while, I'd figure it out, but it just doesn't work for me in the way that I like to work.
The idea of the reinvented Vue business model is interesting. It is designed to make money by selling content (houses, trees, plants, etc) and use the application as a springboard vehicle for those sales. It's interesting in that Daz Studio has shown it to be a successful model (as long as the content is extremely high quality). Smith Micro (Poser) has tried this with Content Paradise but their content comes nowhere near the quality of Daz. I haven't invested in any Vue content yet, but some of it does appear compelling. I just found that Vue's add-ons to open the package up to the full version were a bit costly in my book... especially when you start buying trees, bushes and plants. I might do this at some point when I have some spare cash, but I already have an excellent landscape generation tool and it's called TG2.
Anyway, the point is, what makes that scene isn't the quality of the render, it's the quality of the objects IN the render. To be convincing, a plant needs to look like a plant. A house like a house, etc. That's what makes or breaks a scene. If the object is of low quality, then the whole image appears digital or somehow 'wrong'. TG2 can easily produce the same scene, the question is... can it do it better? Probably not... but that's mostly because of the plant, house, bird objects that Vue had no hand in the creation of. Vue's lighting and atmosphere system is probably its best aspect and that's what the image creator took advantage of in the farmhouse scene.
As for the future of TG2, TG2 probably needs to become content-ware as well. I would like to see Planetside set up a store involving the sale of TGO objects for use in TG2 renders. By setting up such a store, Planetside could take a cut of any TGO objects sold and increase how much they make from TG2. They might even make enough to reduce the cost of TG2 and make it up on the sale of content. But, TG2 also needs to allow for a plug-in system so that the sale of third party plug-ins is possible. Planetside also needs to allow the easy export/import of node networks as presets within TG2. So, if you want to drop in clouds produced by someone else, you simply import a cloud preset. These presets can, again, be sold on a Planetside content store for purchase by users who want to produce a scene.
So, then, the whole thing becomes much more focused on the content produced than about the application itself... which is probably as it should be. Such a store would also allow for much more easy location of objects for use within TG2. Right now, it's not nearly as convenient in that we all have to find .OBJ files and them import them. With a TGO store, it's a one click download and you're rapidly producing a scene. The other good thing is that a store can entice existing 3D modeling artists to begin creation of objects for sale on a Planetside store. There are plenty of artists who sell on Daz, Content Paradise and now Vue's store that would likely begin producing content for Terragen 2 were a store to become available.
Thanks.
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Brian
