Doc Mojo opened this issue on Dec 14, 2001 ยท 39 posts
thip posted Sat, 15 December 2001 at 2:31 PM
No offense, docM., but you plug, so I'll preach. Bear with me, I think the battle between landscape apps is fascinating. Personally, I'm sure that the kind of procedural approach you use is the future (any Bryce or Vue user knows the fascination of procedural tex's). Unfortunately, seeing the MojoWorld gallery, I'm also sure the future hasn't arrived yet. Lovely images, to be sure, smacks of Terragen's glass-painting-clear light, and Bryce's when it's best. But as with pre-5 Bryce, the shortcomings are painfully obvious to any Vue'er : no real vegetation. I love those sci-fi/fantasy images as much as anyone, but they tend to get monotonous after a while. Take it from an addicted Brycer. Some nitty-gritty, down-to-earth grass, bushes and tress begin to lure one back to Vue sooner or later, despite the inferior quality of Vue's renderer. There's little if anything in the MojoWorld gallery that couldn't be done in Vue, but there's a lot in the Vue galleries that couldn't be done in MojoWorld, as far as I can see. To be brutally frank, I can't really see that (still picture) 3D artists need another landscaping app, especially one that's in its early, feature-poor stages. The Corel Bryce team realized this, and began to add those features only Vue'ers enjoy : realism and vegetation. Terragen is facing the same unpleasant fact (check out the future plans on the website). The people behind both apps seem to realize that superlative rendering is not the decisive factor alone - content counts, perhaps decisively. It's going to be interesting to see whether Bryce 6 adds some realistic vegetation (instead of the toy version it has now), or Vue 6 finally manages to incorporate a full-blown ray-tracer. That would most likely send the rest of the pack to the cult niche for good. It's none of my business to tell you how to run your business - but I'd start looking at Vue and trying to re-create a lot of its features in MojoWorld. Preaching done - and BTW, thanx for the plug. I agree it's naughty to plug "foreign" software in another software's forum, but MojoWorld makes interesting viewing, and I STILL think procedurals are the future.