PlantCatalog - Annual License

A must have as adding plants of very high quality is essential

The library of plants are realistic and you can tell a lot of time were point into them. Plenty of control for the polycount and movement. The ability to export to any software with a rig or point level is great as well. It's a growing library of plants, trees, and flowers, but it is still new so the library isn't as big as I would like, but the quality is there for sure! A auto download would be a good feature for future plant updates. Something similar to how grayscalegorilla manages their library of assets could go a long way of hassle free updates.

I have been using VUE and Plant factory for years and, approaching 80 years old I am probably one of your oldest customers. It si always with the same pleasure that I open my favourite program. It is such a powerful tool but also very user friendly and I spend quite a bit of time creating book covers for printing.

The product is ok.
The number of plants is way too limited and a little unbalanced. So many Palm trees.
I got this to see if it was worth investing time and money in Vue and PlantFactory. I don’t think it is there yet, so will stick to my perpetual 2016 licenses for both.

[e-on] Hello Brian, thanks for your review. We understand your point. Please note that PlantCatalog is an ever-growing collection of vegetation species - i.e. not static vegetation assets. At the date of writing this comment the collection includes 122 distinct species - totaling over 4400 ready-made presets to get you started, and new species batches are released on a regular basis.
BTW, a "species" means that no 2 plant variation/preset will ever be identical thanks to procedural technology - i.e. you have an infinite number of single assets at your disposal.
If you feel some species are missing feel free to do a species request from the PlantCatalog species request form https://info.e-onsoftware.com/plantcatalog-feedback

Best

Very complete plant catalog, fast integration and good quality. Thanks!

I can't believe how incredibly detailed and powerful these assets are right out of box. There are many different species with so many parameters to tweak, and the results (which can all of course be animated) look stunning. Honestly at the price you pay for this catalog and all the variations you get, it's a complete steal and can save a developer thousands of dollars compared to either buying individual models or using alternate software - not to mention time. I'm overjoyed with how much life and detail these assets brought to my project.

It is early days yet but this product is not as straightforward as the website would have you believe. It may be that I am doing something wrong but at the moment I have great difficulty in exports to blender or daz studio, which should work without any post import fiddling in these programs.
The plants in the catalogue open well in Vue and look very good.
The main problem with the programs that cannot deal with the native .tbf format is that the transparency/alpha maps are frequently not stored in the exported fbx or .dae options. These transparency maps are there when the plant is opened in vue and at the moment I am fixing the problem by opening matrials in vue, locating the transparency maps and exporting them individually to use in the other programs. Sometimes the black/ white has to be inverted (Daz studio). . I would be very pleased to find I am doing something wrong but at the moment export is not a seamless operation or I would have given it more stars

[e-on] Thanks for your return on experience. All the maps should be dumped upon export - incl the transparency maps. There's absolutely no need to get into VUE to retrieve these maps.
Check your export settings and make sure you use the "convert materials (using original texture maps) export mode in the material Export frame. Feel free to contact us on our tech support if you're still having questions. We'll be happy to assist.

The application itself is great! Of the plants/trees that are available you can export them at different levels of maturity as well as seasons. You can also generate multiple variations of the same species of plant so you can have no duplication of plants. The only disappointment is that there is absolutely none of the common North American trees such as Maple, Oak, Beech, Birch, Elm. The selections that they have tend to be more exotic so for my needs the subscription was not worth the investment as I could have purchased these elsewhere. They do post a list of the plants that are in the catalogue and I recommend looking at this before purchasing. Unfortunately I did not see it prior to purchase which is not their fault. The technology however is first class and if they broaden their selection it will be a great resource.

I answer both for plant factory and plant catalog, I would like more doc & tutorials in French