Not wanting to get into arguments, but am posting the following for clarifications.  Plus a frank opinion.

The key features of the Producer version of The Plant Studio have to do with developing and maintaining a central library of models in an organization where many different kinds of people need to "check them out" for different purposes.

For example, a plant model builder for a movie company may be a botanist, and she or he may be different from the person who is going to apply textures and color, et. al. to the model for various lighting conditions. And those two people are different from the animator who needs periodic access to the plant model for purposes of making it do perform whatever actions are needed for various film sequences. All these people need access to the same plant at different stages of it's development, and there needs to be some form of "version control" for the library of plants as a whole.

This is an expensive kind of library system to construct, and expensive processes are needed to ensure that legal licenses to the product are maintained properly. This is what's in the Producer Version, and the primary reason that the Producer version is so expensive. Of course, most of us individuals are not going to want all this baggage, we won't have the networked hardware to put it on, we won't want to be maintaining all this complex stuff through the software upgrade processes, and we certainly won't want to be paying for these capabilities. Its probably not reasonable to expect the Producer version to sell for $395.00. 

I'm wondering if the name "Producer" is causing some confusion here in that it suggests to some that you cannot produce a good  or complete plant unless you have the "Producer" version.  The fact is that most of us ordinary individuals can create most plants we can think of and use them in Vue with the Studio version.

This is an impressive piece of software. For most people who would like to make plants for themselves, use them in Vue, and export static versions to something such as Daz Studio, this is a wonderful bargain at $395. You will not find anything like this on the planet at the moment at this kind of price. 

That said, there seem to be two bugs discovered so far, of the kind that are easily fixed. There are limitations in the Studio version that affect model-builders who must take the generated plant from The Plant Factory and further process it for use in film or professional-grade advertising. In fact, for model-builders who need or want to do post-processing for any purpose, there is the fact that the plant geometry is triangular only, rather than quads. And this is so fundamental to the mathematics of application development, this is unlikely to ever change for this program.  So for me, who is just one of these kinds of people, this is a serious drawback, and I'm going to continue to cherish my copy of Sppedtree.

 

OK - here comes the opinion part....

But let's say that you are an ordinary Vue user with a little DAZ Studio or Poser thrown in on the side. Frankly, you are crazy to not go snap up this thing IF you can afford $400. This is a month's wages for me, but I'm in this Vue game for the long haul. Further, I keep up on the scientific and technical literature dealing with forestry in the 3D world. I know that the problem called level of detail, especially for conifers is a significant problem. Thhe "level of detail" problem is where you would like to be able to see individual needs of a conifer in the foreground, but you don't want all the conifers in a forest to have that many polygons because your computer will choke up and die. And further away, the needles in a conifer take on a "cloud-like" haze appearence. The "level of detail" problem is that you want to be able to make a picture where you can see both the individual needles , and also the forest in the middle and background -- without requiring the resources of all the computers on earth.

These guys at E-On Software have cracked this problem. They are the first to do so in a commercial application. One that any ordinary person can have and use, not just the guys at Industrial Light and Magic.

I'm not crazy stupid - I bought this and  I plan to make good use of it. Bugs will be found. The price will go back up to where it should be. Frustrations will occur. But I'm not stupid - I bought this while the getting is good!