Hmmmmm, not so fast to rush to judgment.

I would like to take a close look at the program, at the beta, and post some observations here, at least from the point of view of a professional plant physiologist/forester.

So that you all know, I do own and use a copy of Speedtree, and in the past, I have purchased and looked at almost all the plant/tree generators in the 3D world. What I've found so far is a) that creating programs to generate real trees [especially conifers] is a significant technical problem in computer science,  and b) all but Speedtree are significantly lacking in features, ... if you are looking at these things from the point of view of trying to create physically accurate trees of real species.

Speedtree, by price and by nature of an extraordinarily steep learning curve, is not a program for the ordinary hobbyist. An ordinary person can quickly generate something that looks like a tree with Speedtree - this is what was done for the movie Avatar. But the ability to create reasonably faithful representations of actual tree species requires about three months of full-time self-teaching and experimentation. On the other hand, in the end, it IS possible to build almost every known type of tree with Speedtree. Plus, the company staff are very responsive and quick to include features in their program that are missing. Maples and ash exhibit true bilaterial symmetry, and they are pretty much the only tree species to do so. The folks at Speedtree were very quick to incorporate this feature in their program as soon as the need was pointed out to them. So, I am pretty pleased with them.

Now, we come to The Plant Factory. I know, from spending time among the technical journals in the computer science world, that the Vue folks seem have been delving deep and investing heavily into the science. I don't know what is in this program yet, but I do know that two of the most promising young scientists in this field seem now to be working for E-On software. This may not be a program for casual hobbyists and artists, but we want the ability to create physically accurate plants, yes?  And whatever is in here probably is going to be ground-breaking as far as the science and technology are concerned. This is the kind of thing that Nicholas Phelps does. He doesn't blow his own horn and make a big noise in the world. He does go after the best the science has to offer, and pushes it further than anyone could reasonably expect.

So, let's wait just a bit and take a closer look to see what we have here. This may turn out to be a program for the professional world - for Maya and Max and Industrial Light and Magic. Or just for the very few tree professionals like myself that do work that nobody cares about really. But creating ground-breaking technology will eventually spill over into the hobbyist world and we'll all be better for it in the end.

Meanwhile, I promise to take an in-depth look at this thing from a professional forestry standpoint and will post comments here as I look.