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.  

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

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.  

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?  

 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?  

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?  

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

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.......  

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.

 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!

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.

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.

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.  

Essentially, you move the stream into general postion in your foreground area. Select the first joint and fine-tune the placement. Typically, this joint will not be visible in the camera view if your scene is designed to be looking up the stream. Instead, this joint will be below the camera and closer to the viewer.

Then, starting with the second joint, rotate or elevate that joint. Working with each joint, moving away from the camera and toward the far head of the stream, shape the stream as you intend it for the final stream.  That is, create bends or changes in elevation, if that is appropriate.

The reason that you start with the joint nearest you and the camera, is that the first joint is an "anchor" joint. Each subsequent joint further up the joint chain moves the remaining part of the poseable stream, without moving the joints further down the joint chain - and without moving the portion of the stream that you have already moved into position. 

Now, you can load or import other objects and place them around the stream to form the bulk of the scene. These objects can be small patches of terrains, stones, plants, or objects in the stream, such as fish or boats. You also can add any of the River Rapids pieces to create rocks and foam flowing around the rocks.

That is all there is to the process.

Not allowed here, sorry.  

Four different poseable streams are there now.  Easy to find - just look under the Objects - Water catagory. No one expressed interest in having them here in the Rendo store. A fifth wide, swift moving poseable stream is under development due to interest expressed there.