@ calico
Thanks for the compliment
@ efflux
Wow, this tree looks really good
Well done.
@ TheBadger
I will render a plant in Terragen 2 and C4D, no problem
This is everything I have access to (besides Vue). And yes, you can export plants as *.3ds, *.obj and *.fbx in the pre-release which is what I did for the Vue render (the direct link to Vue is not yet active in the beta version). There are some bugs when exporting trees right now such as a missing triangle here and there, but e-on already said that they know about this and that it will be fixed in the final release. For more information on features and stuff, read on
@ Martin
Ok, Martin, I will try to answer all of your questions as thoroughly as possible.
However, I cannot compare the Plant Factory to Speedtree because I've never used it. I own XFrog both as a standalone and as a plugin for C4D, though, and have some experience with it. So if there should arise any questions regarding comparability with XFrog, I might be able to partly answer those.
First, you were surprised that I thought 300 € were a good price. Well, I really think it is. It is on par with XFrog (not counting the current summer sale) but the Plant Factory can do more in its studio version than XFrog. So yes, I think the pre-release offer is a good value. And in any case, if I will ever upgrade to producer, I will only have paid so much in total because I already got the studio version 60% off.
I hope the OpenGL view will be ported to Vue 12. The current view is ok, but Vue could definitely benefit from an improvement. Admittedly, with Ecosystem instances and all that stuff, there is a lot more workload for the graphics card in Vue compared to TPF.
You are right that posting the image of the 3D tree removed the uncertainty, which of course is a good thing. My point was that the users simply didn't take the time to look at the plants' setup, even though it was pretty obvious in the first place
You can load objects from other 3D packages into TPF, there's a special "Object"-node for that. I also think that they will customize the UI further to remove the greyed-out features, because that's the way they handle it with the different Vue versions. I'd be surprised if they went down the "lazy route" after all this criticism.
Regarding rendering, you can do a proper preview inside TPF, but it is very uncomfortable. If you want to get a picture with a larger resolution, you have to resize the 3D view which automatically changes the image aspect ratio, too. E-on should at least enable the option to select the desired render resolution. I can live with the limitation of not being able to adjust render settings. After all, I use Vue or any other package for rendering and TPF for modeling. The resolution thing bothers me, though.
Here are three screenshots to illustrate what I meant with "extracting parameters". Vue has the ability to "publish" sliders and fields from a node directly into the material or object editor so that you don't have to dive into the complex node network every time you want to adjust a parameter of a function.
This screenshot shows the complex node setup of a Vue rock material and one parameter that was published to the top-level under the name "amount". The next screenshots shows what this looks like in Vue's material editor. Basically, you get a seperate tab with all your published controls, so you can create your own, unique material and shader interfaces in addition to the standard controls.
The plant factory was said to feature this function for plant creation as well. This means you should be able to select certain parameters from your nodes such as diameter, angle, width, length etc. and "publish" them as a seperate interface that can then be accessed in Vue's rudimentary plant editor. The next screenshot depicts the current plant editor in Vue and the possibilites to modify a Solid Growth plant. My expectation is that you will be able to build your own, custom interface for later editing in the plant editor by publishing parts of your node network as seperate controls. However, it appears that this will only be possible in the producer version. Do you now understand what I meant?
@ everyone
I attached a screenshot of the current interface of TPF so that you can take a look at it. Also, I created screenshots of ALL the available nodes and options in the studio pre-release. You can take a look at the huge image here:
http://vuescapes.homepage.t-online.de/tpf/tpf_nodes.jpg . I guess there's plenty of information for you in there
