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.