My two cents on this as a TG2 and Vue user. Please feel free to correct anyone if I'm saying nonsense.
TG2 cons:
- Animation controls virtually non existent and the app gets very crashy when you play too much with camera keyframes. If you're thinking of TG2 for animation, better wait a few months (or years) and see how it develops.
- Doesn't "talk" well with other apps. The importing of scenes, objects, mats, camera paths, etc. varies between bare-bones and non-existent. Prepare for a lot of trial-and-error. In this respect, Vue is much, much better integrated with other mainstream 3D apps.
- Object handling is poor due to the fact that no wireframe can be seen in the viewport, only a bounding box. This makes working with very large number of objects impossible in practice. In addition, trying to import and render entire 3D scenes (I'm talking a couple of million polys) has always crashed Tg2 for me before, though I must admit I haven't tried again with the latest version.
- Tg2 is very bare-bone. No presets for anything. All your skies, atmos, clouds, materials have to be created from scratch. There's no quick way of putting a scene together.
- No breeze or wind function for populations.
- Can be pretty crashy too (tho not worse than Vue) and the latest version has seen the return of the annoying "black poly" bug I thought was gone for good a long time ago. This one can be a nightmare when rendering animations.
TG2 pros:
- Yes, render times can be huge, but so can be Vue's (sometimes stupidly so). I actually never rendered an animation to the end in Vue because of this, whereas I've rendered some anims in Tg2 (mind you, never with water or a camera standing too close to the ground).
- Every Tg2 scene is a whole planet, not just a little patch of land as in Vue. This allows you to work on truly epic scenes and (if Tg2 plays ball) truly epic animations. This for me is a big plus, especially considering that Vue generally chokes on its own infinite procedural landscapes (which are not really infinite). A nice by-product of this is that you can create any number of extra planets in Tg2, and these are real planets, not sprites as in Vue's planets (which are completely pathetic in my view).
- But for me the slam-dunk argument really is Tg2's incomparably superior displacement and atmospheric quality. If you want to obtain really high quality landscapes in Vue, you need to apply lots of colour and bump maps on pretty rough-looking landscapes. No need for this in Tg2, which easily gives you centimetre-level procedural displacement. A huge difference between the two apps is the fact that Tg2 displaces its landscapes not just on the y axis (upwards, downwards) as Vue does, but also laterally. This is a pretty massive advantage as far as I'm concerned and it gives you the possibility to create truly stunning overhangs and reliefs procedurally and across an entire planet while you would have to fake it in Vue by importing third-party 3D objects. This also means that in Vue, any near-vertical landscape tends to become flat. The closer you get to vertical, the flatter the shape. That's what happens when you cannot create lateral displacement (or displace along normals). This means you can't actually create realistic out-of-the-box landscapes in Vue without faking things with textures.
- The same point (realism and just sheer beauty) applies to Tg2's atmospheres and clouds, which I think are miles better.
- Tg2 is cheap!
One big difference between the two (but not necessary a downside either way) is that you have less control over the shape of your scene in TG2. By this I mean you often position your camera in Vue first then compose your scene around it, only modelling the bits of landscapes you need. In Tg2 the workflow is different. You first model your world then walk around looking for the best perspective angle. At least that's how I do it (and I haven't used the painting tool much yet, which should give a lot more control).