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By Kelleytoons - Last Year
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Okay, so I bought this thing (including the French add on) and here's my review (note: I am NOT trying to be mean here. But I have a few thousand followers who have been begging me to review this and I just can't wait any longer. The TL:DR - don't buy).
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By Soya_RL - Last Year
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Kelleytoons (5/19/2024)
Okay, so I bought this thing (including the French add on) and here's my review (note: I am NOT trying to be mean here. But I have a few thousand followers who have been begging me to review this and I just can't wait any longer. The TL:DR - don't buy).
Hi Mike Kelly,
We're terribly sorry that BuildingGen did not meet your expectations. Regarding the feature design, our product team will discuss it. Here, I would like to first address the crash issue when pressing "Optimize". Could you please provide the files so we can clarify the issue? The steps are as follows: 1. At 3:44 in your video, please press the "Archive" button to package it. 2. Send us the output Media and Prop folders and files. Please refer to the attached picture. You can use cloud services like Google Drive to provide these files to us, and place the link in your comment. Thank you very much.
Soya
 
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By wires - Last Year
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Thank you Mike for this very concise and factual review. Maybe they lost the contact details of all the Beta testers that have helped in the release of excellent products over the years and should just post a please contact us message on the Forum. Anyway I'm glad that I held back on this one.
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By Kelleytoons - Last Year
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soyasu (5/20/2024)Here, I would like to first address the crash issue when pressing "Optimize". Could you please provide the files so we can clarify the issue?
Soya,
I want to be as nice as possible here, but just so you understand - at this point in time I really don't even want to spend another minute with this as I've already wasted FAR too much time. And this issue (optimize) is just the tip of the iceberg - honestly, I found at least five other significant bugs when using the product I didn't even mention during the video (things far more serious).
Sometimes you have to cut your losses and move on, and at my age I need to do that. If I find a moment in my life where I have some time to waste I will certainly consider sending you folks the files. For now just understand that if you couldn't find these issues (things I found EASILY) there is a major problem with the way you are testing things.
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By animagic - Last Year
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I have already bought this, when it came out...:crying:
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By Trender 3D - Last Year
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Thanks for this Mike.
Like many of you, I spend way too much of my hard earned $’s on Reallsion content and own nearly every plugin that iClone and CC4 has on offer. But I took one look at this product and the cost associated and thought forget it! And I’m glad I did!
Personally, I feel that this Plugin should be FREE (and integrated into iClone; like Motion Director) then if you want the French Design windows and wall panels, etc you pay for that pack. Reallusion can then launch and sell the Modern contemporary, or English or Italian Architecture packs separately.
That’s my opinion at least.
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By gordryd - Last Year
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So my plug-in ("Building Blocks" -- $10 in either the Marketplace or Content Store) WILL do sloped roofs (you can control the pitch). I suspect RL released BuildingGen after seeing the success of my plug, which has consistently been one of the top sellers since it was released a few years ago.
That being said, I will be the first to admit the limitations of my plug -- it uses the included RL Props from the "Walls & Door" folder, so there are not a lot of customization options, but with a little imagination you can get various looks, as shown in the example below. The link in my signature will take you to my plug-in page if you are interested.
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By animagic - Last Year
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animagic (5/20/2024)
I have already bought this, when it came out...:crying:
I must have had a moment of insanity or felt charitable...:crazy::unsure:
In the past I have used a simple architecture program (also cheaper than the plugin) with FBX export.
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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If I was less of a scifi/fantasy fan and more into “contemporary urban” I would buy this for Blender while its on sale (Well..if I did not already own every single stonemason Daz set from the last 15 years) :D
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By animagic - Last Year
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This makes me even sadder...:crying:
I may get this. How is it polygonwise for export?
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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animagic (5/22/2024)
This makes me even sadder...:crying:
I may get this. How is it polygonwise for export?
Sadly, it does not support usable export to other programs as it depends heavily upon Blender’s native procedural geometry nodes system for its functionality (According to a post by the addon’s creator over on Twitter/X)
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By Nirwana - Last Year
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Sadly, it does not support usable export to other programs as it depends heavily upon Blender’s native procedural geometry nodes system for its functionality Does Blender not have a function similar to C4D's "Current State to Object" which would bake down procedural geometry into static meshes?
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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Does Blender not have a function similar to C4D's "Current State to Object" which would bake down procedural geometry into static meshes? Blender has an “apply modifiers” option as well as “realize instances and baking procedural texture to image maps etc.However the geometry node system is a bit of the “wild wild west” where most addon devs assume their target buyers are people who work exclusively within the Blender ecosystem comfort bubble of native materials and render engines and would never consider needing to export an entire city set environment to a third party character animation application.
The realty is that it is far more practical for someone to move Characters with animations over to apps/game engines ,with larger environments, via FBX USD, Alembic (or special plugins like diffeo or the Daz "bridges"), than it is to move large environments over to Character posing/animation applications Like iclone, Daz Poser etc..
Also remember Blender is FREE so the entry cost of becoming an add-on developer is effectively Zero.
To effectively test and verify export functions to other programs you have to actually own all of those other programs which are not free except for the game engines which unsurprisingly get ALOT of content export support from the 3DCC’s Like Maya and Blender or Max where most video game content is actually created.
Back on topic: it is likely no coincidence that Reallusion has put up a new 90+ minute webinar on BuildingGen
to tell their side of the story
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By Nirwana - Last Year
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The realty is that it is far more practical for someone to move Characters with animations over to apps/game engines ,with larger environments, via FBX USD, Alembic (or special plugins like diffeo or the Daz "bridges"), than it is to move large environments over to Character posing/animation applications Like iclone, Daz Poser etc..
Of course. That is why I move animated CC characters from iClone into C4D scenes and not scenes from C4D into iClone. However, since there are still people who do their entire animation work (including rendering) inside of iClone, I was just wondering if it is possible to export output from this Blender plugin to iClone (maybe not entire "cities" but a couple of buildings at a time). BTW: I somehow do not think that BuildingGen is capable of generating entire "cities" either. I'm aware of a few pre-made models of "cities" (or rather a number of city blocks with a 3-digit number of buildings). But then we are talking about 15 to 20+ million polygons and I don't think iClone would like that too much.
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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we are talking about 15 to 20+ million polygons and I don't think iClone would like that too much. Probably not, but there is valid a reason why Reallusion provides solutions like the Live link to unreal or the omniverse & Blender Pipeline tools. That said, I do not think BuildingGen for iclone is a bad Idea per say but it appears to have some bugs that should have been addressed before release, as Kellytoons pointed out.
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By animagic - Last Year
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AutoDidact (5/22/2024)Sadly, it does not support usable export to other programs as it depends heavily upon Blender’s native procedural geometry nodes system for its functionality (According to a post by the addon’s creator over on Twitter/X)
Thank you, I will not get it then. I hope that RL checks out the functionality of this add-on, as it has many features that would make their product more useful.
I have my reasons to stay within iClone. I have by now thousands of assets and with the post processing I apply the native renderer suits me just fine (I'm not into hyper realism).
I discovered a long time ago that modeling is not something I'm really interested in or have a specific talent for, so I try to get by with what I can find.
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By Rampa - Last Year
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You can likely get the geometry out of that iCity addon. The issue with geometry nodes stuff is usually with textures. So if you decide to try it, export from Blender as OBJ. Make sure to set the scaling to 100 (it defaults to 1) or you will get a micro-city. Sometimes Blender models have n-gons in the geometry that iClone has a hard time with, so also make sure to check the triangulation box in the Blender OBJ export panel, if you have strange trinagles where there shouldn't be.
You will probably need to apply your own materials (might be a lot) when you get your model imported. But these types of models are usually fairly low poly.
These are things figured out using another addon, Platform Generator:
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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The Add-on creator is currently working on making it exportable with textures for "other softwares& game engines" so hopefully optimized enough for iclone import soon.
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By animagic - Last Year
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Thank you both. There is hope! :w00t:
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By argus1000 - Last Year
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Like Kai, I find some positive things to say about BuildingGen. A YouTube poster has delivered two tutorials that clarified a lot the software for me.
It’s in French, but there are English subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW38Ms_qO6o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar7kPGgh7hs&t=3s
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By Rampa - Last Year
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I went ahead and purchased the iCity Blender addon (because it is on sale for a few more days). The functionality is really cool, but if you want nice detail like BuildingGen, it is not that. Looks promising overall though. :)
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By AutoDidact - Last Year
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Rampa (5/23/2024)
I went ahead and purchased the iCity Blender addon (because it is on sale for a few more days). The functionality is really cool, but if you want nice detail like BuildingGen, it is not that. Looks promising overall though. :)
The good thing about Blender market addons are the free lifetime updates so when the creator sorts out textured the export Challenges you get the updated version for no extra cost.
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