Just got the e-mail from e-on about this.

http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/

Anyone know any more about it?  It's got its own domain name, and it sounds like it won't be tied to Vue?

Quote - run efficiently on any platform, including real-time and offline rendering systems.

It has attracted me.

I like how they say it's the best.

Did get the email as well and it caught my attention, but I don't thing we get more info as we do have now, until E-on decides to gives us more. Somehow I do have a feeling this is beyond my budget.....

I have XFrog and have always found it to be first class.  I wonder if this program will do something that XFrog doesn't? 

Quote - I have XFrog and have always found it to be first class.  I wonder if this program will do something that XFrog doesn't? 

Based on what we can see so far, it will fully intergrate into the ecosystem technology in Vue or Carbon Scatter including procedural generation of variants and it will also interact with breeze and wind. This is something that x-frog models cannot do as they are static plants in Vue.

Ciao

Td

e-on tends to hype what their software does.  It's just plants for non-Vue users.  It would be cool though if it was the tree editor that e-on devs use to make their .VEG files.

What they have shown so far (including a very short glimpse at about 2:15 in this video: http://vimeo.com/fxguide/review/56698226/ba696c4cda ) Plant Factory is an independent program that seems quite different that the old .veg models. If some or all of this will be implemented in Vue or only be available as separate purchase, I do not know.

TD

Quote - It's just plants for non-Vue users.

That would be weird since the majority of newsletter reveivers are people who use some version of Vue.

I get newsletters all the time from e-on trying to sell me their cloud software, and I have Vue.

@thd777, is SpeedTree part of what e-on is selling to make trees?  Did e-on buy SpeedTree?  Either way, I would not afford buying it.  Have too many tree programs already.

No, the Plant Factory is NOT SpeedTree!  It is a completely different product.

Shawn, no, SpeedTree has nothing to do with the e-on Plant Factory. The video in the link is an advertisement for a VFX course that covers a number of programs. The short blip about the PlantFactory is right after SpeedTree because it is part of the same workflow step. But it shows that it is already in beta in the hands of VFX professionals and it clearly has a Vue style interface in a separate program.

Ciao

TD

ok.  I didn't watch long enough.  I see, a plug-in for Vue or some such.  Alpha plane rendering (to speed up renders) for custom trees one may not have in Vue already.  Very clever.  Maybe a discount for Vue users, or something included in Xstream?

they had better not pull a fast one on us and expect us to pay for a product that should be PART of Vue

we've been demanding a better plant editor for years, if they force us to pay and use an external editor...well, that's way out of line.

this had damn well better be the new plant editor FOR and within Vue, with an external module for other non-Vue apps, just like Ozone is really an externalized version of Vue's atmosphere engine

why should we have to pay for an updated plant editor, eh?! HELL NO, so it better be a free module for existing Vue users.

we'll see what they say later, but I will be very vocal in my outrage if this is not the new Vue plant editor module, free for those who have Vue with Botannica (and that means Complete Infinite and other versions too), AND a standalone for the liks of 3DMAX etc

Attached Link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/114414932422559557662/posts/Xo2RSKEojah

https://plus.google.com/u/0/114414932422559557662/posts/Xo2RSKEojah

Mazak

Well, all the info has been released and the prices have been announced...... I'm completely unimpressed. For those kind of prices, I'd expect a lot more, especially when it comes to quality. So, far I haven't seen any better quality trees/plants then what we do have now. At those kind of prices, I do expect hight quality trees that can be used for close up as well and not more of the same old mediocre quality Vue plants I already own for years. Time to show some close ups of these plants and trees to even get me considering thinking about buying this.

Biggest bummer of them all..... Vue 11+ only, no older Vue version support and I even read you're not allowed to sell your plants/trees, unless you do it through Cornucopia3D, but I'm not sure if that's for all versions. Just checked again, not you're not allowed to sell, except through C3D..... yoiu pay a lot of money for a lot of limits.

I'll just buy plants that I need from Martin Frost.  I don't need Plant Factory.  I have three different tree programs now I don't use.  I won't add another one.

Plant Factory was a promising app, but now that E-On has announced the pricing, it suddently looks less interesting.

http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/03/Plant-Factory-%E2%80%93-Product-Lineup%2C-Pricing-and-Pre-Release

The users sounds very disapointed und upset. 

Mazak

Yes, they are, a lot of them and I don't blame them. The only ones to blame are E-on for making the product way to expensive and imposing all these restriction, it's just ridiculous.

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.  

Good to see that someone is still positive, I can't get myself to it..... mainly due to the lack of good quality images. So far, the stuff they've shown just look like Vue trees and compared to Onyx or SpeedTree those aren't of great quality at all. Good quality trees are hard to get and while Vue is great, a lot of their trees are huge let down and I was really hoping that Plant Factory would be different. But so for the out of the box trees look very familair.

A few initial observations and comments.

This is going to be significantly better than Speedtree in terms of versatility. That is, the ability to create more kinds of plants.

The ability to make deciduous leaved plants with full leaf geometry and with fractal processes is a great scientific and technological step forward. Probably more than most people realize.

The learning curve for most people for all but the high-end versions will be pretty decent. Almost everything that most people will want is presented and controlled by clearly labeled sliders.

In fact, the user interface is very well designed. Not too much resmblance to what is in the current YouTube videos - much more advanced than what was shown there. The layouts are great. A lot of thought has gone into where different kinds of families of functions should be placed. The hierarchy of processes and the ability to drill down into relevant details is wonderfully clear.

There ar little problems, even with that though. I want the ability to zoom in on particular elements of a tree, for example the roots. But there do not appear to be mouse controls for that. General panning and zooming in and out  are OK, but one cannot control the vertical or horizontal point of focus to zoom into a given area.

People are asking about some features, such as the ability to respond to wind.. It is in there Lots of wind controls. The sample trees are great, at least in my humble opinion. Some are not botanically correct, at this writing, but others, such as the banana tree are purely lovely!

There are some other basic things that have not been discussed earlier, but that are of great significance. For example, the geometry is exclusively triangles. no quads. This affects and will disturb people in the model-building communities who must do post work on plant models, but it might be of no concern to most ordinary users.

One of the great features of Speedtree is that every genrating function is available at the equation (expression) writing stage and there is a nice expression editor in the program. But, this can lead to problems, as hundreds of expressions are used to contruct various properties of the plants. Sometimes, these expressions cn interact or cancel out each other's effects. It takes a lot of learning and experimentation to learn where these conflicting equations and expressions are located.

From the little I've seen of The Plant Factory, this is never going to be a problem. There is a very nice independence of function throughout the plant editor. This means that a ruthlessly systematic and clean architecture was devloped for the tool prior to actual programming and development. This is going to be a powerful application with a nice foundation for further development over time.

There are some issues forming about which features should be in which versions at the higher end - the more advanced versions. These issues probably won't trouble most people, and will be resolved about the time the program is realized in full form. The artist versions aimed at the casual user probably will be quite good, and a good investment for the money.

The million polygon limit for the Studio version has been lifted, but why in the name of all that's holy do they restrict users from using models created on this license? Apparently if I have two licenses of Studio, I can't take the models from the one license and transfer to the other license. I mean, WTF? Why this restriction? Why does e-on behave with such incredible paranoia? For me, this is a COMPLETE deal breaker even if the foliage is PERFECT.

I was hoping to buy this software - especially at the special price of $395. But then I also think that the Producer version should have the Studio price and the Studio version remain at $395. Apparently many others do as well. Oh well e-on...  another lost sale.

I believe this idea that you cannot exchange plant models between two licenses of The Plant Factory is an error, megaldon. It is clearly intended that plants made in the high end versions of TPF be usable is all the versions of that program.

 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!

And please pardon all the typos and spelling errors in the above. I am struggling to write on my tablet at the moment - no keyboard.

Please be aware that The Plant Factory is compatible only with Vue Version 11 or higher. If you do not own Version 11 of Vue, do not buy The Plant Factory.

Please be aware that there is no documentation at this time. It is clear that a User Guide is being written, but none now exists. It is difficult to learn a complex piece of software with only a few YouTube videos to work from. So, if patience and complexity are not your "thing", you probably should not purchase this at this time.

Of course, be aware that there will be bugs. "Beta" stands for "bugs", right? There will be frustrations.

If you are not put off by all the above, keep in mind that if you purchase this now, when the beta period is complete, you will end up with the legal license to a functioning plant generator.

If, ..... you survive the beta period.......  

Quote - I believe this idea that you cannot exchange plant models between two licenses of The Plant Factory is an error, megaldon. It is clearly intended that plants made in the high end versions of TPF be usable is all the versions of that program.

Actually it's been confirmed that there is indeed that restriction in place. It isn't an error. Amazing.

"You would need Producer to be able to transfer assets between multiple copies of Plant Factory.
It will be possible to upgrade from Studio to Producer."

At the bottom of the comments - my post 30 their reposnse 31:

http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/03/Lifting-the-Polygon-Limit-on-Plant-Factory-Studio-and-Selling-Plants

You are correct Megalodon. I did not receive the answer you did when I asked specifically about this.

Quote - You are correct Megalodon. I did not receive the answer you did when I asked specifically about this.

Well that would figure - different answers for different people.  :)

But they want us to spend $3k for two licenses of Producer instead of $790 for two licenses of Studio JUST so I can transfer models between the two. Am I the ONLY one who think that's...   stupid marketing?

Megalodon, for a small studio such as yours, would you not be better off with one or more copies of Speedtree?

It appears that E-On Software IS going to be quickly responsive to the good points that you have others have raised about two people needing to transfer plant WIPS among themselves in a small studio.

But realistically, for model builders such as you and myself, who are providing content for people beyong the Vue'ers marketplace, isn't Speedtree better suited to our needs?

 I need to build hero trees and other plants that can withstand close-up renders for the advertising trade, that can be designed to exact specifications in terms of branch, leaf and root placement, that can have very well developed and articulated roots, and very high resolution barks. And that can be rigged in great detail so that the end customer can position and array that tree exactly as they envision. For these purposes, there is no subsitute for a careful model-built  or model-finished plant. For me, this requires Speedtree with it's quad geometry, and Maya for the finish work. 

I'm happy to see the emergence of The Plant Factory, obviously, and I'm happy to review it here, but I'm not giving it positive reviews because I am a "fanboy" to the exclusion of common sense.  

Speedtree is still going to be my primary tool of the trade, and for those of us who need full modelling access to the plant via the traditional tools of MAX, MAYA, Cinema4D, modo or whatever, Speedtree remains our best option.

Yes?  

So what you're saying is that E-on's Plant Factory cannot deliver the quality needed for trees that are used for close ups and in the foreground? I've really been wondering about this.... Vue trees are great for using at a distance, but I buy quality trees from others (as yourself) for my hero trees / trees used in close ups and foreground. what I've seen so far from TPF are trees that really look way too much like my current Vue trees and still don't have the quality to be used for close ups and so on. TPF seems to be just another way to create mid quality Vue trees or am I completely wrong? I'm mainly concerned about broadleaf plants.... palms in Vue aren't too bad at all, but tress with smaller leafs are just bad in Vue at the moment.

 A good question, but I am not saying that at all. 

The Plant Factory trees are high quality and undoubtedly will be great for closeups. They are as good as anything anyone can make with any procedural plant generator.

What I am saying is that some types of companies and individual people need trees or various plants that could appear in a very precise way. To get this, these trees need to be modelled exactly, in one or all details that matter to that person or company.  Think of the "home tree" in the movie Avatar. Or think of an advertising company that needs to make some gloious, high definition version of the central tree for the Amazon Kindle.

Or, think of a picture that you might want to make in Vue, whose central feature is going to be a very detailed knarly old apple tree learning against an old wall. That has very interesting and eye-catching twists and turns in it's bark.

To create this, you (or me, if I am the vendor), need to be able to take the "base model" tree from the plant generator, and do a lot of further design or texturing work on it in a modelling tool. That is, we need full modelling access to the plant.

It is not a simple matter of "high quality" versus "low quality." It is more a matter of hand-crafted and fully polished "hero plant" versus "Boy, I was able to generate this very fine plant for my scene, and look how well it came out!"  Does this make sense to you?  

Or here's another way to put it. I make mostly water models, but I am a forest ecologist by background, and so I do make the occassional "hero" or central character tree for the Vue community. 

 Even when there are fantastic plant generators available that allow people to either push sliders around to create a plant, or hand draw one, there probably still will be a need for someone like me to make hero plants.

When I model one for you, I am going to make one that is absolutely botanically correct, because I am a forest ecologist. I can't help myself, and why would I bother doing something lesser?  So, if you need to make a render featuring a Japaense Maple of some special kind, and the peole you expect to look at your render are capable of recognizing a Japanese Maple from a fake, you'll probably want my hero tree, rather than something you try to approximate yourself in The Plant Generator.

Or, I might make that same Japanese Maple in a very interesting and eye-catching shape. One that is particularly pleasing, and also poseable so that you can tailor it to your scene, and also use it over and over again. You might want to buy that from me because I made it be just so in a modelling program. Your chances of being able to "generate" something exactly like it in a plant generator are not so good.   

Some trees out in the real world just catch our imagination, yes?  They are distinct, unique and wonderful, yes? They stand out from all the others in the forest, yes?  But the other, more ordinary trees are still of very high quality, yes?  

Does this help explain the difference?  

Always go with your first gut instinct when thinking about buying a new product from e-on.  Their promos always seem too good to be true.

The trick is to be certain that a program can produce a specific result you need.  And it looks like it can at first when viewing their videos.  e-on isn't tell you everything though.  But you know this buy now if you've bought software from e-on in the past.

The above applies mostly to the 3D hobby person.  A corporation will just buy the program without a second thought.

Ah geez, Shawn!   That's an opinion as good as anything else, I suppose. 

But I would rather "go" with an informed knowledge of the wide field of science and technology, and an inquiring mind interested in new developments, and willing to learn something unexpected.  

Yes, it does make sense, but I'm still hoping people will show some close ups from trees made with TPF. I understand that if you want something special or botanical correct, TPF will not be sufficient enough.

But.... even when I don't need a botanical correct plant, to be honest, so far, for me Vue trees (even the HD ones) have been a huge let down when used close up or even at the foreground. I always choose other non vue trees for that purpose. I'm just hoping that TPF will change that, but so far I get the feeling I will still need to look elsewhere.

All of the renders I've seen until now, look like regular Vue quality plants made with a different engine, giving more or less the same results. They're still very recongnisable as Vue plants, while if you take XFrog plants for example, they offer a much higher quality and it shows right away. At the moment, TPF promo's put me off and stop me from buying, they all look way too much like what I've got from Vue right now, they just were grown in a different, yet very expensive way.

Well Shawn has a point though. E-on's promos are very misleading. They still show images for Vue Pioneer, Frontier and Esprit, that can never be achieved with them at all, but that goes for Studio and Complete as well. When getting Vue Studio, I quickly found out that some of the promo images show with it, can only be achieved with Infinite. For some of the other things mentioned and shown I need the AdvancedGraph module, but they somehow forgot to tell me that, only when trying to accomplish some of the things mentioned and shown I found out. I personally do find E-On's product presentations misleading.

Same with TPF info given now, it is confusing and even misleading. Judging from the whole confusion around TPF versions at the moment, I'm not the only one confused.

All I take away from the demo is that tree trunks are splined.

But do I want to spend $400 + $$$$ for Vue 11 Infinite to use that one said tree that's locked to my license of Vue?  Because in my gut, this new plant program will make just basic trees.  And we'll have to buy HD/procedural content from e-on to make more kinds of trees other than the default ones that come with the program.  And if that bought content is locked to our plant program license, I don't want anything to do with that kind of file/content management.

Add to that, that the trees have tiled bark textures just like Vue trees do.  And I'm not hurting for new trees at the moment.  And I'm not a botanist.  And a tree's appearance is subjective anyway.  Not like humans, where you can point out right away how fake one looks.  Who's gonna say, "Oh, that tree's bark is slightly off."  Or, "That tree's roots should be more gnarly."

I can make a more realistic tree by modeling one, if I need a totally realistic one for a scene.  If this plant program was $300 and worked with Vue 7 or later and made more realistic looking trees (ie, HD trees that were in VEG and VOB format, generated from my own texture images) than what Vue comes with, and there were no locked licenses to deal with, I'd buy the program right now.  But e-on does not view me as a corporate customer, which is who they are after, even though they are using 3D hobby channels to market their software which is kind of dumb from a corporate's eye view.

I'd say both of you are very wise to not invest in The Palnt Factory.

Quote - Same with TPF info given now, it is confusing and even misleading. Judging from the whole confusion around TPF versions at the moment, I'm not the only one confused.

The other thing e-on does constantly is use ambiguous language describing their products that is errored towards you buying either the wrong product or a feature you didn't know you already have because you are still learning the program, and they posted it as being a brand new product in their store when it is old standard content.

Please don't think I am "dismissing" either of you.

Benjamin, there is nothing wrong with being dissatisfied with everything that exists today for making plants. You and Nicholas Phelps have that in common, you know.  If you like what has been done with Xfrog, I would very much recommend that you purchase a copy of the Xfrog plant maker and try your hand at it. As well as continue to acquire plants that have been made in it.

Shawn, I have nothing but respect for a guy that can take a conventional model-building program and build a good quality "hero" tree in it from scratch. This is probably the best thing for you to be pursuing.  

Thank you Forester for your analysis of Plant Factory. With your background and a knowledge of the models you produce, I really appreciate your careful descriptions of what the product can and cannot do.

http://www.theplantfactory-tech.com/index.php?post/2013/06/07/Plant-Factory-Studio-Pre-Release-Phase-II#comments

Thank you Paula. Just trying to be a good citizen.

Quote - Megalodon, for a small studio such as yours, would you not be better off with one or more copies of Speedtree?

My primary reason for looking into TPF was the animation of the foliage. I don't create models to sell them - so that's not my concern, but I do understand that for others it IS very important. TPF just looked like a great option to export animated plants for use with scenes inside of Lightwave. But with the restrictions on the Studio version, it just seems that e-on is far too paranoid and I don't really like how they've handled customers over the years anyway...   so I think I'll opt out. I may look at Speedtree, but right now I've decided to sit back and wait until I really NEED something.

Hi Folks,

I had the same misgivings as many others I’m sure. When I saw the greatly reduced price for jumping in at the Beta phase I bought knowing how powerful Vue is and despite the oft seen complaints, that E-On’s products are truly remarkable. I know of no other company creating such user friendly interfaces and hoped it would be the same with Plant Factory. I was not and am not disappointed.

I’ve only had about twenty hours to devote to Plant Factory so far, but each time I open it and play I’m more impressed. Most things are so well thought out that even without documentation; it’s fairly simple to figure out how to do things.

I’m going to take the other pathway here and praise E-On for their attention to our want’s and suggestions which led to the lifting of the poly limit and the unlocking of the graph. I suspect they are paying close attention to our suggestions now as well and I expect they will give us some of the changes we are asking for.

At first I was disappointed by the tri’s and lack of quads until I understood by looking at the actual wireframes and how they work. It’s targeted towards animation and keeping poly counts down and it’s quite elegant how it does that.

I have been able to use the Bull in a China Shop method and do some very complex things very easily. I then bought Geekatplays video’s which as always saved me many days figuring things out.

As far as “Hero” plants and trees, you can get any quality you want limited by your motivation, time you want to spend and what your system will handle as to poly counts. The detail level is up to the user.

This is nothing like the plant system in Vue, even though it will work natively in Vue as species. While tweaking plants you can jump between Vue and Plant Factory on the fly. Plant Factory will do pretty much anything you want, limited by your skill level more than anything else. This is not about buying species from Cornucopia if you have this version; you create your own from scratch. You can even include things like age, season and so forth that are controlled with sliders in Vue’s plant editor.

If it saves me just a few days’ worth of hours and gets me the end result I want, it’s worth every penny and paid for itself right up front. I’m happy with Plant Factory and happy with how E-On has worked with us.  I’m glad I took the chance and jumped in. I’d like to compliment E-On on how they handled this roll out.

As to comparisons, I’ve only done the trial of Speed Tree and it seems like a step above Speed Tree to me. I’ve used XFrog for some time and this is in a whole other league. You WILL see far more realism coming out of this I’m sure. The examples in the marketing are not at all the limit of what can be done with this. Those are rather low resolution for these days and meant for animation, not a “Hero” object. That gorgeous older Acacia is far lower poly than I’d have guessed.

Since it exports UV’s there really is no limit to how realistic the textures can be. Until they solve the exported mesh issues, I’ve found a simple workaround using Poser Pro2014 to get the mesh into ZBrush.

A Number of us Lightwave users are asking for a Lightwave export. Fingers crossed.

I know nothing about the technical end of creating software like this, but I'm guessing this was a leap forward. Making something so complex, so simple at the user level has to be.

woo welcome back Czar

ny! :)

czarnyrobert,

The Plant Facory interface is a work of art. You guys did a wonderful job with that. I find it far more intuitive than XFrog to use. Just wanted to compliment you on that.

I must admit that software interface ergonomics is my passion.

In mine opionion TPF interface is good, but it could be better.

There is still a bunch of interface issues which annoy me.

When working on such project, you can't force all ideas you have. There are ressources imitations (limited number of programmers typing the code), and some software limitations making some ideas very costly (= almost impossible) to implemet. Also boss usually wants to have his final world in some topics  :-)

So as always, compromises had to be done.

By the way, I don't know what is the default user interface layout at this moment, but I find that layout showed above is the most handy when working in procedural mode (definition of plants with graph.  Please check if it helps you to have even smoother working experience with TPF. 

:-)