oFusion PRO questions?

I have few questions about oFusion PRO (OFP):

1. 1. Does OFP support instancing of geometry? i.e. if objects are instanced in MAX, then do the objects get instanced in OGRE also? i.e. do they use the same XXX.mesh file, and only their transformations change.
   
   2. Does OFP preserve MAX scene hierarchy? i.e. if I have created a scene with hierarchy, then in OGRE, does OFP create the same hierarchy?
   
   3. What are the main differences between OFP and OgreMAX (which is free)?
   
   4. What features does OFP offer, that OgreMAX doesn't offer?
   
   5. We're facing lots of problems with OgreMAX material. It is so inconsistent.
   a. Is the OFP material system good in 3ds MAX?
   
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   If there are any oFusion PRO users out there, what has been your experience in using OFP?
   Is it worth the buy?
   
   Is there any trial version of oFusion PRO?

I use both Ofusion Pro and OgreMax depending on whether my client will support OSM or only .Scene

1) Ofusion supports instancing in the .OSM scene format, each entity gets a unique name and in the case of a instance, simply references the same .mesh file in the .scene file.

2) Yes it does preserve heirarchy

3,4) Main differences are a better scene format, binary or XML, a scene serializer for saving scenes. ShaderFX support, more reliable material editing and intuitive ogre rendering in viewports. Ofusion is typically easier to use.

5) I have the same issues with ogremax and often use ofusion to create my materials, then copy and paste into my ogremax material file.

6) yes it is good and converts 3ds max/DX9 .fx shaders to ofusion/ogre materials quite well which is a big plus if your an artist that can't code shaders.

My only concern with Ofusion Pro is that new promised features have been slow to materialize. Like ShaderFX 3.0 new feature support, particles etc. But what is there works very well indeed and is generally still more intuitive and easier to use than ogremax. Ogremax 2.x is VERY good for free though, and supports .scene which a lot of projects favour being a ogre native scene format. You can have teams from different apps exporting compatible scenes where OSM requires 3dsmax to create the .scene files.

So overall Ofusion PRO is the better product, but the last few months development seems to have slowed a lot with mostly bimonthly bugfix releases.

Hoping 2.0 isn't too far away because Ogremax 2.0 has caught up bigtime.

Thanks Evak.

I agree with you. OgreMAX is a very good free software. But it has some limitations.

I especially miss the "StaticGeometry" option in OgreMAX, and the ability to break down static meshes into regions.
Because of the lack of this feature in OgreMAX, we end up doing lot's of manual work.

I had one more doubt, by hierarchy, I mean does oFusion PRO scene loader recreate the same hierarchy via scene nodes?

For ex, in MAX, I create 6 boxes A, B, C, D, E and F.
B and C are children of A.
D is a child of C.
E is a child of F.

(See attached image)

Is the same hierarchy replicated by the scene loader?
Can I query for a node by name "A", or "B" or "E"?


Is anybody representing oFusion there in this forum?
When will the next version of oFusion PRO be released?
Do you provide any evaluation version? That way it's easier to convince my senior to buy this.
Otherwise it's going to take some convincing without a evaluation version.


Thanks

So long as your using the pro sceneloader you will have no problems at all with heirarchy. You can save gameplay objects in seperate scenes and merge multiple OSM scenes into a level, grab their anchor node from the list using one of the built in callbacks and manipuate your gameplay object complete with heirarchy and animation in code.

By heirarchy I'm talking about linked objects using the link unlink tool, can be meshes, lights, cameras. Doesn't matter really.