There are some very nice features in vue, the obvious one being the procedural vegetation with it's unique instances that vary by size, shape and even colour differences. The ability to animate the vegetation so it reacts to wind is also nice. But there were a few other things that caught my eye as well that would be nice to have in TG2 one day, such as -
The animated waves and surf round the island during the animation.
Automated Smart Scattering
Vue will automatically recognize foreign objects, and reduce the presence of EcoSystem items around them.
The single instance tool
This tool turbo-charges the process of placing individual plants, rocks or other objects in your scene. There's no more need to add a tree to the scene, move it to the desired place, then drop it to the ground. Simply point and click, and a new tree is created in that spot, and is automatically dropped to the surface. Of course, when using SolidGrowth plants, each new click generates a different instance.
Affinity and repulsion
Layers in an EcoSystem material can also influence one another. By using the affinity and repulsion parameters, it's possible to define a relationship between two layers. For instance, using affinity, trees in the first layer can affect the distribution of grass in the second layer, so that the grass grows only around the trees.
Enhanced EcoSystem Display
View vegitation by:-
Wireframe boxes
Billboards
Wireframe
Smooth shaded
All that being said when looking at the most important thing, the quality and realisation of the image, TG2 still has the lead for me. Both in terms of landscape and atmosphere/cloud rendering. So at it's core it has the better landscape rendering engine it just needs better and more advanced tools to help create these landscapes which will hopefully come in future versions.
