Macuarium: Our readers would like to know a brief history of Onyx Computing. What could you tell us?
Onyx Computing, Inc., located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, is a software development company specializing in the design and development of procedural, knowledge-based creators and modelers of vegetation. The company was founded and incorporated in 1992 by Pjer Zanchi (pronounced as Pierre Zanki) and me, Bojana Bosanac (pronounced as Boyana Bosanatz).
The history of our OnyxTree family of products goes fourteen years back when I began my doctoral research at the Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
While at Harvard, I was deeply involved in the research and development of knowledge-based systems for computer modeling of plant forms. My knowledge in botany, visual arts, design, and computer graphics, and my ability to synergistically blend these different fields of expertise were crucially important in giving OnyxTree products a solid theoretical base. After earning my doctoral degree, Pjer Zanchi, an accomplished design engineer and manager, and I had decided to start Onyx Computing.
In the past ten years, Onyx Computing has developed and published widely acclaimed TREE PROFESSIONAL, the first and the only true tree creator on the market, TREE PAINTER (CLASSIC on Windows platform), a junior brother of TREE PROFESSIONAL, TREE STORM plugin - the first 4D modeler for trees on the wind, and OnyxTree BAMBOO (currently available on Windows platform), a dedicated bamboo creator and modeler.
With the beginning of this year, we have replaced TREE PROFESSIONAL with OnyxTree PROFESSIONAL Suite (currently available on Windows platform), a suite of four standalone creators for broadleaf trees, conifer trees, palms, and bamboos. The suite presents our transition to a modular system which will allow us to expand the research and development to cover a much wider variety of vegetation. Our customers will be major beneficiaries of such a modular system because the modularization will deliver them much more flexibility, superior vegetation, and many more species and plant families.
Macuarium: Onyx Computing's current products for Macintosh are TreePro 4 and TreePainter. Do you have any intention of updating both apps or releasing any new application for Mac OS in near future?
We are currently working on OnyxTree PROFESSIONAL Suite 5.1 for MacOS X and expect to release it by the end of March of 2002.
Macuarium: Please, introduce Onyx's products to our readers, what kind of beneficts can they bring forward potential costumers? What can they find in both TreePro and TreeStorm for EIAS that can't be found in other packages?What are the main and substancial differences between TreePro and TreeStorm?
OnyxTree PROFESSIONAL Suite (to be released for MacOS X by the end of March 2002) is a suite of four standalone procedural creators and modelers: OnyxTree BROADLEAF (creates and models broadleaf trees and bushes), OnyxTree CONIFER (creates and models conifer trees and bushes), OnyxTree PALM (creates and models palms), and OnyxTree BAMBOO (creates and models bamboos). Major benefits that the Suite brings to the user and that cannot be found in any other software packages are as follows:
1. The user can create his or her own custom trees, bushes, palms, and bamboos by adjusting the values of parameters that describe the plant. Since the programs themselves have the expert knowledge required for modeling, the user does not need to know much about plants and he can still "make" his own tree with ease.
2. Each creator comes with extensive library of ready-to-use presets so, if the user does not wish to create custom plants, he can use the presets from the libraries as they are or change them slightly to accommodate to his particular needs.
3. Each creator has a direct link to our Nurseries on the web which offer additional ready-to-use plants. The Nurseries are ever growing collection of trees, bushes, palms, and bamboos created by our customers or Onyx Computing experts. The plants in the nurseries can be downloaded free of charge.
4. Each creator supports seven (7) object file formats: 3DS, C4D, DXF, FACT, LWO, OBJ, and W3O. These file formats allow the user the efficient and speedy export of the plants created with any of our creators to the most popular rendering and animation packages on the market.
TREE STORM is a unique product in that it is the only 4D modeler on the market that models trees on the wind. For anyone who is interested in the wind on trees, this is the ultimate and the only solution
TREE PROFESSIONAL and TREE STORM complement each other. TREE PROFESSIONAL is a creator. TREE STORM cannot create trees, it reads a parameter file created by TREE PROFESSIONAL and then models the tree following the instructions from the parameter file. On the other hand, TREE STORM animates trees on the wind, TREE PROFESSIONAL cannot do that.
Macuarium: Last announcements from Onyx Computing were aimed to PC users. What's the current proportion between Mac and PC users of TreePro? Has the Mac base proportion declined over last year?
The main reason for not having any new announcements for Macintosh users for a period of time has been the fact that, in the recent years, Macintosh has gone through turbulent times and changes of the operating system which has given us a pause. Also, in that same period, our Macintosh customer base has not grown the way our Windows customer base has been growing and we simply could not afford the development expenses for the platform that seemed to be loosing computer graphics market share. Nevertheless, we want to keep our loyal Macintosh customers happy and expect that Macintosh computer graphics market will get back to its feet and this is the main reason for embarking on the development for MacOS X. And, at the same time, we hope that the Macintosh customers will continue supporting our research and development in an effort to bring them the best tools there are for creating and modeling vegetation.
Macuarium: TreePro and TreeStorm must work closely with other packages as a plug-in or export capabilities, but most of them are Windows only for version 5 (i.e= C4D Cinema 4D, LWO Lightwave, FAC Electric Image, OBJ Maya). How's the relationship with these 3D firms? Can we expect to see a solution for Pixels3D, StrataPro, Carrara Studio or any other 3D application?
OnyxTree PROFESSIONAL Suite for Macintosh will support seven (7) object file formats (3DS, C4D, DXF, FACT, LWO, OBJ, and W3O) which will enable the users to export the plants from OnyxTree creators to the most popular rendering and animation packages without any problems.
As for TREE STORM, the situation is much more complicated. As much as we would like to give our Macintosh users the capability to animate trees on the wind, TREE STORM is a plugin and not a standalone application. The development of the plugin of such complexity as TREE STORM is extremely demanding and expensive and it requires extra efforts of both, the plugin developers and the developers of the parent applications. The companies that develop the parent applications would love to have us develop TREE STORM for their programs, but they are generally not ready to give us a required support. This is why we will have to subject the plugin development for any of the above mentioned applications to the highest level of scrutiny before making the go-ahead decisions.
Macuarium: How do Onyx develop their apps? Does the Development of plants and botanic items need a different aproach? has Onyx any special team for R+D?
The development of procedural plant creators requires multi-disciplinary knowledge and expertise in botany, visual arts, design, and software engineering with the ability to conduct the research that involves analytical skills unprecedented in the commercial field of computer graphics. It is an extremely complex and demanding process that requires a lot of time and involves the literature and field studies, the design of the most appropriate rule based systems and modeling procedures and, exhaustive test cycles and adjustments until the required versatility of the creator program and the quality of plants it can generate are achieved. With all of the above requirements and demands, Onyx Computing R+D team is certainly a very special team! Thanks to them, Onyx Computing can offer such high quality products.
Macuarium: What's your opinion about current situation of Apple Computer? Do you think it's running in the right way?
I do not think that MacOS X was designed with the professional 3D computer graphics market on mind. Given the very commercial flair which Macintosh now projects with its computationally expensive user interface eating up the processor time from demanding 3D computer graphics applications, I do not think that, in the long run, Macintosh can stand the competition from the Windows, Intel based computers. So, to give you a straight answer, no, I do not think that Macintosh is on the right track as far as the 3D computer graphics field is concerned because of the lack of emphasis on its performance. If they wanted to have such a fancy user interface, they should have built in an extra processor dedicated solely to that function.
Macuarium: How's the relationship with Apple? Does Onyx Computing have any help from them?
No, we do not.
Macuarium: What's Onyx Computing point of view about the new operating system from Apple and its technologies such as OpenGL native support, Java2, Quicktime, Quartz...? And for you as a developer, do you see any advantages in this OS?
The technologies you are mentioning that are supported by MacOS X do not concern us much. The most important thing, from the standpoint of our OnyxTree products is computational power because there is never enough of it when one is dealing with the vegetation. And, as far as the computational power is concerned, we have been grossly disappointed with MacOS X. The only advantage we see to our products at this time is new memory management which should be robust enough to support memory intensive 3D graphics applications. We have not had a chance to test it yet though.
Macuarium: How do you see 3D market? do you think Apple could gain marketshare? in your opinion what should Apple do to increase its presence in proffesional 3D environments. Do you think Mac OS X may help Apple to gain access in markets where it couldn't angle till now?
As said above, I do not think that MacOS X is geared to 3D computer graphics market and I do not believe that, unless Apple improves its performance for graphics applications considerably, it stands a chance against the Windows, Intel based computers.
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Daniel Turnes
Macuarium staff
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