Quote from: Bluestorm on June 07, 2013, 08:59:03 AM
Martin, I am sorry for addressing you directly since you probably don't know me because I am a silent reader in this forum and almost never post here, but I have to set some of your false assumptions straight.
Hey Blue,
Thanks for chiming in here, much appreciated.
It's ok to set things straight and I hope you realise that at the most possible I'm trying to emphasize I'm ventig my opinion only and not "the truth". Some more about that later blow in this reply to your extensive reply.
In a way a little pity I could only have you become active here on this forum through topics like these
but hey, that's ok of course!
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I am completely with you in regards to this PR-mess. E-on really did not do very well when they "communicated" the prices and product line-up. They public outcry because of the prices and feature sets is well deserved, because some decisions are downright mind-boggling which has been addressed a lot in this thread and everywhere else. However, the behavior towards e-on as a company is another story and while you kept relatively calm in your comments on Facebook and at TPF blog (yes, I read all of those) and certainly had more than enough constructive criticism to bring forward, they way you behave here, "away" from e-on, is beyond arrogant, pretentious and full of bad-mouthing. I highly respect you as a Terragen artist, I wish I had half the skill you have and I see you helping everywhere you can in this forum, but as soon as things get "Vue"- or "E-on"-related, you completely step out of line and lose any sort of objectivity even though you might often have a good point. I fully see all your worries regarding the EULA, the pricing scheme etc. and some of it bothers me, too. But people know what they are buying and speaking of "almost illegal" methods is way too far-fetched and on the edge of defamation.
Exactly. I think what you describe is exactly how I kind of intend to have it.
In this place I feel comfortable and I feel I'm with people who most of the times think like-wise and share interests in relation to CG landscaping, but also general CG or even completely other topics.
A forum area like this one contains all kind of topics, some also about politics and those can get pretty heated too.
However, "outside" this little niche I'm communicating with people I do not know and not know what to expect.
Also, when communicating with E-on I'm communicating directly with them and I do realise that.
So that explains your first part where you explain that anything outside this forum seemed to be ok for you. Good.
Then I rant here about their business. You may like it or you may not like it. That's fine, really
I can tell you I have dealt before with E-on, sending e-mails, posting messages. Result? 0.000%
So that already gives a small (so cynical here) disadvantage for E-on.
Then their whole PR-mess on top of that.
Well, for me it explains enough and justifies enough for me to freely rant here about their arrogance and ignorance.
What you forget is that they have been very insulting from the beginning. You focus too much on words I think.
So why did E-on insult the people interested?
The 1M poly cut is a true insult by saying "dear buyer, this is what you need and what you'll get at the most from us".
It's arrogant and insulting.
Also insulting is their total lack of response to so many other perfectly understandable questions like having your license transferred to Producer, because Studio seems to be too restricted after first usage.
They are silent and seem to don't care.
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Pamela (aka "forester") is one of the main content providers for Vue and has been modeling and selling plants at Renderosity and C3D for years. As far as I know, she grew up with programming and 3D computer graphics as her profession, so she definitely knows what she is talking about. Yes, she is that "1 out of 100" - person and not representative for the average user, but not because she said something positive about TPF, but rather because she is a professional who has more knowledge and insights into the workings of plant software than the hobbyist. Her comment with fractalization was very likely in regards to the automatic plant variations that have been part of e-on's Solid Growth plants from the beginning and were now carried over to TPF. These variations are based on fractals and mathematical patterns. Apparently, she read some articles in specific scientific computer magazines that were talking about new developments in plant generation and e-on was one of the companies doing research (the French), the other one was probably Chinese. After trying out TPF, she was amazed by the inner workings, so for her, the "French won". What's the big deal?! It is one sentence in her entire post and you just seem to be fishing for things to criticize and disqualify her opinion without any reason.
Without
any reason?
So you don't agree that the "french did won" part isn't a bit off?
Especially if you claim to have some authority then it's just not very smart to put things like that.
She should have said exactly what you just explained. Thanks for that by the way.
You explained that it probably has to do with transferring SolidGrowth tech to TPF.
Despite I'm not a Vue adept I do know a bit about SolidGrowth.
However, I don't know anything about something going on between France and China and doing some fractal stuff.
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Next up, you make general assumptions about all the people who do business with e-on. They all hate the company and praise the software endlessly despite of its many flaws, according to you. Yes, there are people who think Vue is the holy grail for everything and there are people who are unhappy with e-on, as how this is the case with every software company out there. But there are also a lot of people who are happy with e-on while still seeing Vue's obvious weaknesses. I thought Vue 7 and especially 8 were a nightmare stability-wise and held off with an upgrade for the first time because I was so dissatisfied. I got back in the game with Vue 10 because I had heard very good things about Vue 9 since they made a lot of changes to the internal code and the units system. Both 10 and 11 have been very, very stable with only the occasional crash that I also get in C4D which is known for its rock-stable coding. I even upgraded to xStream last year which I wouldn't have ever thought I'd do a couple of years ago and had nothing but good experiences so far. e-on really improved the quality of their products during the last couple of years and so I am a happy customer now. There are still a lot of areas where Vue is lightyears behind Terragen 2, e.g. terrain displacement, realistic atmosphere colours and cloud fractals, so yes, there is room for plenty of improvement and I hope e-on gets on par in these areas very soon, just as Planetside is behind in terms of animation and interoperability. Both softwares have their advantages and their disadvantages which makes it so great to own them both (which I do). I have no problems doing business with either Planetside or e-on, I respect both companies and I could give you a long list of other people who do as well.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
The majority of this paragraph is about tech/stability though.
I admit my opinion is likely biased by rather seeing more negative feedback on e-on than positive.
You can see this broadly like reading topics about problems with Vue on how to do something and how it's lacking.
And frankly, you don't seem so many of those topics, but what just stays in my mind the most is that whatever I read either has to do with stability which despite that seems to have improved a lot or has to do with how they run their business and especially how they treat their clients.
And that's where my first hand experience comes in fits with what I read. They ignore a lot of requests, issues and other types of communication.
Whatever reason there is, too busy, lack of resources or lack of interest...who shall say...point is that that's what sticks in my mind the most.
Again it's ok if you disagree, really, I'm just giving you my side of the story.
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Next, the Plant Factory. I bought the pre-release because I thought the price of 300 €[/s] was very good(??), even with all those restrictions that I also encountered during my tests in the last days. Some general information:
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- The interface is highly intuitive. Whoever has worked with World Machine, Vue's Function Editor or Terragen 2 before will feel at home pretty quickly. You connect nodes that are very smiliar to XFrog components (e.g. segment node, hydra node etc.), but have a lot more control. All the parameters are arranged logically and you can fully customize your workspace by moving windows around.
- You can save your custom-built nodes into a library (not yet possible in the pre-release) so that you can later "click together" a tree pretty quickly. You can build your own library made out of your own leaves, trunk types, fruits, flowers and so on and simply combine them with the click of a mouse. Take the stem of an oak, combine it with the needles of a conifer and and the fruits of an orange tree. It might probably look very silly, but it is a lot of fun.
No not silly at all
I can really understand that that's just cool to play with.
SpeedTree's UI is also extremely intuitive. Even I understood it very quickly
And yes, I know it's a node based system and it's exactly why I became excited about this product, because I know the complexity and versatility it offers. Love it!
However, if I recall correctly I couldn't save SpeedTree's nodes seperately.
Can't remember exactly, will have to look for the demo once again to be sure, if possible.
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- You can draw a tree by selecting the desired component (e.g. a stem node) and clicking anywhere while moving the cursor. The component will follow the mouse movement and grow along this "invisible" spline. Again, you need to build your nodes first so that you can select them for painting later.
...
- You can click on any part of the tree. It will be highlighted in red and you can rotate, scale and move it with standard manipulation gizmos. Very easy and intuitive.
Yes I saw that in the videos. It kind of works the same as in SpeedTree.
Frankly, how can you do it in a different way? I don't know, so it's understandable it is so similar.
Same goes for rotating stuff.
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- The textures and surfaces are done using the same material editor with every function that comes with Vue. You can even access the function editor for displacement etc. However, as mentioned by several people before, there are basically no function/fractal nodes in the studio version which is HIGHLY disappointing. If you have access to a copy of Vue, you can build your function there, save it and load it into the material in TPF as a workaround. Not very smooth, but it works for the time being.
Really? Not very smooth maybe as a workaround, but if I'd have Vue then I'd really like that option to exchange those kind of setups between Vue and TPF.
I think this is actually very cool.
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- The OpenGL-display is fast, responsive and high-quality. Much better than in Vue and less crash-prone.
TG's OpenGL still has issues with drawing tons of stuff. I suppose the fast openGL rendering will be ported to Vue 12?
I can imagine they needed a solution for TPF as it would have higher priority than in Vue.
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- There are three different ways to create leaves: either with a billboard object, a warpboard object or as a seperate option within the segment (branch)-object called "blades". The billboard option looks really good on mid-distance and in the background and is a HUGE improvement over the terribly ugly and dated Vue trees that existed so far which you probably know also as a Terragen user. The "blades"-option grows leaves directly out of a branch as full 3D-objects that can be twisted, rotated, curled, displaced etc. The "warpboard" is basically a flat polygon that you can apply a texture to and then rotate, curl and twist it as well. Probably the easiest while still good-looking method for the creation of single 3D-leaves. I'd definitely use full 3D leaves for Closeups. Of course, if a tree's leaves were constructed using billboard nodes, it WILL have billboards on export which is completely logical. e-on didn't do any "damage control" by posting the 3D-tree in response to the criticism, users were simply too stupid to take a look at the graph which was composed of - yes, you guess it - billboard nodes which are even called like this in the graph editor. This is glaringly obvious when you take a look at the graph and it is not e-on's fault that people overlooked it. By the way, all the trees that e-on unveiled during the last couple of weeks were constructed using billboards, even the acacia tree that everybody is raving about. The trees are supplied with the pre-release, so you can take a look at them. Only the banana tree has "real" 3D-leaves.
Thanks for the info.
Can you also import objects into TPF and use those as leafs or fruits? That's something cool about SpeedTree, although it requires modeling skills in 3rd party apps.
I agree people were too stupid to use the function properly which resulted in the "holy sh*t my leafs come as billboards" discussion
Wasn't posting that full 3D damage control? Of course, it took away the uncertainty.
At the moment I do not intend to go through all the videos on their blog again, but if they have stated to be revolutionary for the last couple of months and didn't demonstrate clearly that vegetation can be exported in full 3D then it isn't very unsurprising to see uproar when it for a moment looked like it couldn't.
So despite that these people were stupid and wrong, it was caused by high expectations and not very well communicated feature set. I think.
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- A lot of the options that are exclusive to the producer edition are still availalbe in the interface, albeit in a greyed-out state. This is irritating and should definitely be removed. You also feel restricted when you look at integral sliders like season, health or age that you cannot acces, but that sit there right in front of your nose. These should definitely be included in the studio version as they are fundamental options for plant modelling. You can probably still do without them by manually removing the leaves in winter, changing the branch tropism etc., but it is way more work than just using a slider for the different seasons.
Yeah those marketing guys of E-on creep in your mind
I would share the same frustration, but from a commercial aspect this is probably exactly how they would like to make you feel; eager to get the full version.
On the other hand, graying things out is probably a lot cheaper than customising UI's for each specific TPF version.
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- You cannot customize render settings. You can select the five render presets that are also supplied with Vue (Preview - Ultra), but you cannot change a single setting. Also, rendering in a seperate window with a predefined resolution is NOT possible, you can only render in the 3D-view. It is beyond me how you can leave out such an important feature and include it only in the producer release.
Hmmm...so that means you only can do a proper preview in Vue itself or another app?
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- I haven't found a way to "extract" certain parameters so that they can later be accessed and modified in Vue's plant editor (e.g. stem radius etc.). I guess this is also only possible in the producer version which would be a shame.
I think I didn't understand what you mean with "extracting certain parameters".
Seems like you do miss someting from Vue in TPF to me so may be if I'd use Vue I would understand what you mean?
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Summary: TPF is a really, really great piece of software that enables you to create really great looking plants from scratch with a lot of options, even in the studio version without the fractal nodes. The interface is very easy to learn and the software is quite stable for a pre-release. For 300 € this week, IMO it's a no-brainer. For the regular price of 700 € < I'd think twice, though, because there are too many useless restrictions in the feature set for a studio version. Creating plants in different seasons is a fundamental concept and shouldn't be missing in a software that is priced at this range. I am curious as to how the featureset will change (if it does), at least e-on posted that they are listening and influenced by the criticism (http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/06/Feedback-on-the-Pre-Release). My advice: get the software this week, you won't regret it for this price, despite its limitations. I'd think more thoroughly about a purchasing decision next week when the sale is over. It might not be worth it for the full price of 700 €.
Thanks a lot for sharing your view on this.
Let me be clear that I totally agree with you about the awesomeness of the software
Did I say anywhere that it isn't or weren't going to be cool?
I'm still very keen on having it and the money is still there ready to be spent, but I still don't feel comfortable with the whole situation around this release.
The versions line-up, their restrictions and pricing. It all just doesn't add up together correctly for me.
I'll think about it and read that link of their feedback. Unless their feedback says Producer will become Studio feature-wise I'm probably not going to buy it.
I want to drive stuff with fractals and making dependencies and I can also see the ease of use of age/season adjustments.
Like I said Studio shouldn't be restricted in creative options, but only in CG pipe-line work.
Have a good weekend, cheers!
Martin
