Forest Pack Pro Review

@PeteRobie No, you don't pay 257 USD every year. This is the price of a single license, including one year of free upgrades. The subscription plan is optional (70 USD by year), and you can renew it at any time, receiving all the accumulated upgrades before to the renewing date, and one year thereafter.

We usually release two major upgrades every year. In the past (the plugin is on the market for more than 11 years), we have released regular upgrades for a price of 150 USD approximately every two years. Now we have moved to a yearly subcription scheme, it let us to release the new features as soon they are developed, and allow to our clients to have predictable costs and guarantees a continuous product support.

Usually with other plugins usually the upgrading policy is not well defined. Sometimes the software is updated frequently, and others much less. But you don't know if you'll have to pay the next months for a new version, or if it will be free. We prefer to provide to our customers certain security about this.

First, sorry for delay and thanks to all :)

@cads3d : Thanks Paul

@ArLAcH : @olli3d is right. The good thing is that you can use models during your research and then just convert them in proxies. You won't need to reload them in FPP

ø@bpositive Forgot to mention it on the review but the library can be installed in a network path ;)

@mattijsdebruin : Yep! There is a lot of features to make your scene natural. I love the "cluster" feature and the TreeEditor is really easy to use.

@lasse1309 : Agreed!

@PeteRobie : Thanks but the price is for one time, you'll have (if you want beta & updates after 1 year) to pay for a subscription (70$), not again for the plugin!

Great review and images! I'd like to buy forest pack pro, but to be honest, the high price is prohibitive compared to other similar plugins. Forest pack is 257USD (PER YEAR!), Multiscatter 269USD (one time), and Carbon Scatter to 195USD (one time). Is Forest Pack really that much better than Multiscatter and Carbon Scatter? I'd love to see a comparison of all three plugins. Also, I'd be very interested to see a review of Carbon Scatter - ecosystems are fantastic to work with natively in Vue, but I wonder how they do in Max, etc...?

Forest from Itoosoft just rocks. One of our favourite plugins ever, not to forget extremely friendly developers there. Definitely worth spending the money.

nice, but it seems to me that there is not much more information than what we can get directly on ITOO website..

I just downloaded the lite version for some testing and it looks very promising. Off course you can always use advanced painter and scatter grass and / or trees. But this plug in seems to give you a lot of freedom and tweaks to get it the way you want it.

Nice review :-) I use multiscatter too and very happy with it. But it seems very smart that you dont need to convert to proxies. That library function looks cool as well. Perhaps I should try the demo :-)

Personnaly I use Multiscatter which is very good too. I tried Forest Pack but RAM management wasn't very efficient when scattering VRay proxies whereas Multiscatter managed it better so that's why I bought Multiscatter. But: it was about 36 months ago and, since then, I suppose Forest Pack has become very good with RAM management because I see many artists using it (and few using Multiscatter). Maybe the only missing feature with Multiscatter is the "clustering" function of Forest Pack which seems very cool but there's a turnaround for it: you just have to create some basic black & white maps with Photoshop to cluster your proxies with Multiscatter.

Well done Matt. Cracking work as always my friend.