Itoo Software Forum

Forest Pack => Forest Pro (*) => Topic started by: Rawalanche on April 12, 2016, 09:55:30 AM

Title: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: Rawalanche on April 12, 2016, 09:55:30 AM
Hi,

since FP5 is out, I was looking forward to finally see those hidden and frozen garbage objects in FP layer gone, but unfortunately they are still here, ruining my attempts to have simple and neat scene organization. For example when using 3ds Max scene explorer in recent version, I want to see my hidden objects, but as soon as I enable hidden object category in scene explorer, first 9 rows of scene explorer are occupied by extremely unimportant hidden ForestPack cards.

ForestPack is professionally priced plugin so it should handle scene management professionally, and populating scene with random garbage is very far from professional solution. Especially when one does not even use any card-based instance in their scene.
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: iToo on April 12, 2016, 10:44:00 AM
Hi, i'm sorry but we cannot remove the templayes layer, without breaking the compatibility with some features.

We tried it several versions ago, creating the layer only when billboards are used. But that caused us many problems, because there are multiple possible events: from changing the type of object manually, by MaxScript, merge scenes that include billboards and others. Not in all cases Max allows to make changes in a layer, so the result was lot of instabilities and crashes.

So we decided to keep the current behaviour. I know you don't use billboards, but many of other customers do it, and we must support these features.

Thanks.
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: Rawalanche on April 13, 2016, 02:23:21 PM
How about having another Forest object? Next to the Forest Pro and ForestLOD would be something Like Forest Simple. It would be have similar feature set to Forest Pro but without clutter like cards, library or entire rollout dedicated to fake shadows. In geometry rollout, many of the buttons could be removed because it would need to accommodate for custom objects only, etc...

Basically I am thinking of something like MultiScatter style object, for simple and fast scattering of custom objects, which is i think majority of what most people use forest pack for. Currently, ForestPack is extremely flexible and can do very complex things, but it pays a very high cost of very long set up time and having to dig through lot of clutter when trying to set up something basic and simple.
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: iToo on April 14, 2016, 09:40:10 AM
I'm afraid a separate plugin is not an option. Actually it's a mess to compile and provide support for all possible combinations: 7 Max versions, 32 and 64 bit, 4 V-Ray versions, other renderers, etc. That would basically duplicate the work.

We have in our wishlist some ideas to simplificate the Forest interface (may be a Basic/Advanced switch). But Max has a rigid interface for plugins, so it's not simple to implement.
I hope we can do it for next versions. I think that would help a bit.

Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: Rawalanche on April 19, 2016, 10:55:16 PM
Oh... I did not mean separate plugin, just another object in ForestPack category, it would be same plugin, same core code, just different, stripped-down, UI and different internal defaults. :)
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: Rawalanche on February 15, 2017, 02:16:53 PM
Hello,

sorry for bringing this up again, but you guys should really invest some time in researching on how to handle this better. I keep colliding with this issue in every single ForestPack scene I work with. The hidden layer simply makes it impossible to keep scene files clean and organized.

What's worse is that it contains bloat that I, and many other people never used, and will never use. In this day and age, rendering is so advanced people rarely use billboards anymore.
Just look how messy my scene looks with forest stuff:
(http://forum.itoosoft.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=3603.0;attach=7793)

I absolutely struggle to understand how on the one side, your programmers are so smart they can come up with advanced solutions like Effects in ForestPack 4, but on the other hand can't figure out a simple solution of not bloating scenes unless user explicitly decides to use billboards (which almost no one does these days).  :(

Even if it was just another .ini option (same as the one that prevents material override by default), which would be disabled by default, and which would make FP objects empty by default, without default billboards. And even this option would break all of the billboards features, I would be still happy about it, as I never ever use them anyway. I actually consider presence of billboards in my scene mistake/problem/bug, so something that would break them would be actually quite welcome from my side.
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: iToo on February 15, 2017, 05:15:29 PM
Hello,

Some time ago we tried to implement a way to load templates only when needed, but found many problems and idea was discarded.
Although it seems simple, there are hundreds of line of code dependent of the templates layer, not only because billboards but also the library.

Any change in this part of the core would trigger new bugs and potential crashes. For a software wich is actually very stable and used by thousands of customers, this is huge risk.

I'm afraid were are tied with this, if we want keep the compatibility with existing scenes.
Title: Re: Any progress on removing Forest objects layer?
Post by: Rawalanche on February 18, 2017, 05:57:59 PM
Okay :(