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You're welcome! If you want to know anything, feel free to ask. 🙂 I just want to make clear that I won't be pushing any discussions or open any threads myself. While I do work for e-on, I am here in this forum as a private person who uses C4D both at work and privately. I am happy to answer any VUE and PlantFactory questions to the best of my knowledge when something pops up. I just don't want to give off the impression of advertising. I know the video you are talking about, and honestly, it's unsubstantial and just ranting for ranting's sake. If you look at that guy's channel, he has similar videos about many other programs. What he says about Terragen is not true. Which company would not like its customers to learn a software? This is nonsense. If you look at Planetside's forum, you will get lots of help from the community and employees alike. I don't want to take a stand and recommend VUE over Terragen or vice versa. Both programs have their strengths and weaknesses. Whether you need both or just one depends on what your focus is. For displaced terrain work, Terragen is the best solution thanks to its specialized micro-displacement algorithms and its reyes renderer. VUE on the other hand is the more complete package with more vegetation features and stronger integration. So it really depends. A quick word about tutorials: VUE and PlantFactory are bundled. When you get a license, you will receive both programs. Hence we need to ensure that there are learning resources available for both. The tutorials from the end of last year are still current, as the 2021.2 version was the last version released so far, with the new one for this year coming up in the next few weeks, as mentioned in this thread. Unfortunately, we are currently lacking a complete beginner course for VUE, but we're working on it and it will be released next year. At the moment, we are focusing our resources on releasing new PlantFactory tutorials. Thankfully, what Dave said about VUE's learning curve is mostly true. Many parts of the UI and the software are quite self-explanatory, even without tutorials. Of course, we still want to fill the Learning Center with VUE content. With PlantFactory, the learning curve is steeper, because it is a fully node-based program. And we all know that nodes require some time to be mastered and understood, whether it's geometry nodes in Blender, scene nodes in C4D or nodes in VUE/PlantFactory. Because there are not many PF tutorials out there and demand for them is growing steadily, tutorial production for VUE has currently taken a bit of a backseat in favor of PF courses. Thus, most of the learning materials we will release for the new version will be for PF, with more VUE content to come next year then. As for older tutorials such as AsileFX, they are still sufficient for learning the interface and the core functionality. Expect editors to look way different nowadays, though, and when it comes to nodes, a lot has changed and you will most likely not get the same results as in old versions, due to scale differences in scene units etc.; "Realism in VUE" from Dax is no longer really valid when it comes to specific lighting and rendering techniques mentioned in the book, as the lighting systems, atmospheres etc. have changed a lot internally. But it is still a good resource for general tips on how to build realistic environments, from lighting tips to sense of scale and more.

May I direct you to Vue's own version of Cineversity: e-on software Learning Center I must say that the amount of content has expanded considerably since I last checked a few months ago. I wonder if Daniel has any idea why (wink...wink...nod..nod)? What I like about this content is that given the newness of the content, it reflects the latest version. This would be my first choice for learning about Vue and Plantfactory. Another site is Geekatplay™ Studio, Resources for 3D Artists. Tutorials. Unfortunately, the only free tutorials are the oldest tutorials. Another great source for free tutorials is from Nick Pelligrino at AsileFX: (1156) Nick Pellegrino | asileFX - YouTube Again, they may not reflect the current version. What is MOST interesting is that a true master of Vue was Dax Phandi (aka Quadspinner). He was an amazing artist because he studied erosion and weathering patterns terrain and new how to produce those same results in Vue. Everyone one of his tutorials was a Vue master class. Unfortunately, while old Vue tutorials can be found at AsileFX or Geeks-at-Play, every single one of Quadspinner's Vue tutorial is gone. And for good reason.... Dax went on to develop his own landscape package called Gaea . Even when I google "Quadspinner Vue tutorials" or "Vue tutorials Dax Phandi" and follow links that look like they will bring to Vue content, you are only presented with Gaea tutorials. The only thing I can find is his book "Realism in Vue" at GitHub: GitHub - QuadSpinner/RealismInVue: Official open source version of the critically acclaimed book, "Realism in Vue" Dave

I would like to take this opportunity and clarify some things about the integration workflow with C4D and the other host apps for which we offer the plugin. In my experience (and I was not with the company at that time, but still a customer), the xStream plugin in 2016 worked in fact quite well and way, way better than previous versions. The main issue is understanding how to use the plugin properly, because it is not as straightforward as other plugins. The workflow is described in the manual, but then, we are all guilty of not reading the manuals of the programs we use unless it's really necessary, aren't we? 😉 So, I know we need to educate our users better on understanding the possibilites and the limitations of the integrated workflow through proper tutorials. It's on my to-do-list for next year. In a nutshell: When you usually work with plugins, they are completely integrated into the host software, by which I mean that everything looks like native C4D editors and panels and that the objects created by a plugin can be rendered with any render engine, as long as you texture the object with a proper native material. The VUE plugin does not work like this. It runs as a sandboxed software-within-a-software where C4D acts as the "container" and VUE as an app is then launched within C4D with its own dialogues, UI and panels. I believe a good comparison could be Steam ( = C4D) which you have to launch first, and from there, you launch the game ( = VUE) which then runs "within" the Steam launcher. This means that the VUE objects listed in C4D's object manager are low-resolution, procedural proxy objects referencing the "fully" editable object from the VUE scene. You need to use VUE's native tools to edit all native VUE objects. After editing an object, the low-res proxy for the viewports is updated. For example, if you have a terrain object in the VUE scene, the terrain will be listed as a low-res polygon mesh in C4D's object browser. Of course, you could go ahead and start extruding faces and poly-modelling on this object with C4D modelling tools, but this will not be reflected in the VUE scene. And as soon as you open the procedural terrain in VUE's terrain editor, make changes and close the dialogue, the proxy object is refreshed / recomputed in the viewport and your manual polygon edits will be overridden. Look at the screenshot which shows the VUE objects in VUE's native object manager (the World Browser) and the proxy objects in the C4D viewports in the Object manager. Because of this workflow, you need to be aware what you can do and cannot do in the C4D scene with VUE objects. A big no-go is deleting the proxy object from the C4D object manager, to name just one example. If you delete the proxy object, VUE will try to recreate it as soon as you edit the "original" VUE object in VUE's editors, but if you try to launch a render while the proxy object is gone from the C4D object manager, you will encounter problems and instabilities, because the link between VUE and C4D for that object was broken and the VUE object just lost its counterpart in the C4D scene. So, adding and deleting VUE objects to the C4D scene MUST be done through the floating dialogues of the VUE plugin and through VUE's own object manager (the World Browser) which will then sync the changes accordingly to the C4D object manager and add / remove any proxy objects from there. There are more examples like this for which you need to look out, and if you break these rules, you are provoking a crash. This workflow is not obvious when working first with the plugins and we need to ensure that we educate and help our users more on these topics.

Quickly design buildings and surroundings in Cinema 4d. Facades, elements and textures can be easily replaced or created by yourself. Cinema4D Building Generator comes with C4D Standard Render and Octane shaders, but shaders for all render engines can be used. https://florenoir.gumroad.com/l/ltklct Building Generator is one of three plugins dedicated to urban design developed by Florian Renner.

I do have to wonder why the majority of tutorials on scene nodes cover things you could create much more easily with MoGraph or fields. So maybe the lack of adoption comes from something as simple as this: People watch a tutorial, see a primitive being applied to matrix object and yawn. They walk away thinking "why should I learn a whole new system to do what I can already do with far less effort. Show me something "amazing" I cannot create any other way". Now, "amazing" can also mean "unique". What I see coming out of Blender are some pretty unique tools. While I have watched a few scene node tutorials, I must say that none have ignited a spark of creativity in my brain. I do see more amazing things coming out of Xpresso and that is why I have learned Xpresso. I can also understand why everyone got excited over the prospect of Building Generator being a creation of scene nodes because if it was true, people would be exposed to what scene nodes could do! Interest would have been created as that much needed spark of creativity would have been ignited. The best thing Maxon could do now is to get their best and the brightest together to create something amazing with capsules and splash that all over their news section. I checked---nothing there though Buidling Generator was listed. If that was actually done with scene nodes, then it would have been mentioned. Dave

Dave, the comparison table on that page will disappear as soon as the new release ist out, because there will indeed be 100% feature parity between Creator and Pro / Enterprise 🙂 the only difference will be the license terms. For commercial work, you need Pro, for hobby work, Creator will be sufficient.

I left Vue in 2016 right after the Bentley acquisition and the site hack. Those were dark days as Vue was struggling to find their place in the new org. To lose your entire account history AND not see much (if at all) development activity prompted me to stop sending my money to e-on. Now Vue stand alone was a solid app on my system. Vue xStream was not. Operability within C4D was a nightmare. So, when you feel there is no development going on to fix that, and you are locked into to only working within Vue when you were sold on Vue working within C4D with xStream....well....it was very easy to walk away. But that was 2016. Fast forward to today and you see a completely different AND MUCH SMARTER approach: complete and open exportation of all assets plus they are working on Redshift integration. That capability for export only existed at the higher priced professional version which they are now "smartly" extending to the lower cost creator versions. I will be keeping an eye on this page on the difference in capabilities between the different licenses after the 2022 release. Personally, I like the C4D interface much more than Vue's, but Vue is not that difficult a tool to use. Eco system painting is a lot of fun and has slightly more capability than C4D's scattering tools. If I can export eco-systems, which was not explicitly mentioned as being added to the new export capability in Creator, then at $199/year you do have a hell of a lot of cheap capability for creating and exporting fully evolved environment assets into C4D (clouds, terrains, plants, skies) plus the ability to render them quickly with Redshift in C4D. Remember, this also covers Plant Factory and right now the next best option for plant creation is Forester from 3D-Quakers, but their annual maintenance plan is $125 which is kind of expensive. So, this change of Creators capabilities by e-on bears serious consideration given the alternatives. I would start with 1 year just to see how things are working and if Vue is a going concern (e.g., evidence of on-going development and improvement on a timely basis. Sorry, I still have PTSD from 2016). If all seems good, then you have to admit that $600 for a 5-year Creator license is not a bad deal. I would love to see that type of deal with C4D. Dave