Need some advice from the PRO's!

[Justin Hunt]

I have Vray, granted I am still learning so I may be missing something. I agree with you that the community is excellent. This says two things to me, one is that support is aloways on hand, but also that the level of support needed is great.

 

If Vray had all the shader types (Ornay-neylar, mutli-layer etc) and more control over the size, shape of the specular as well as more diffuse level control I would be more happy.

 

But lets not get sidetracked, this is becoming a "Pro Vray and all else be Damed" thread and is diluting the initial request for advice of developing the 3D team. We all know that Vray is fantastic, but I am getting tired of every thread that mentions Vray becomes a flame war. I am guilty of this as much as anyone else. So I am going to stop commenting and defending my choice of renderer. It is irrelevant.

 

JHV

[Devin Johnston]

Good point Justin, OK so we all know Vray is the greatest thing in the world what about Vue? I'm attracted to it because it seems to be able to render out huge numbers of objects that are pretty convincing. I've read through all the material on their web site, and watched the demo which was very impressive. The thing that kind of bothers me is the lack of architectural work on their site, I'm not sure that it can't do it but I'd feel better to hear from someone who has used it for that purpose.

[Sawyer]

I had Vue 4 and one thing I have noticed is that the documentations makes it seem a bit easier to do certain things than it is in reality. I found the importing of models horrible and the import aspect workable. That was a previous realease and I thought about the new version as well but once I looked at a large amount of images I was not that impressed. I saw GREAT images there are striking images done with Vue but many of them I thought were not too great. And it seemed like I had to buy another plugin to get max models to work. And I wasn't really convinced that the workflow... worked.

 

Now I loved Vue 4 for alpha trees and certain skies (seems like a lot of these generators do whispy clouds and gradients well but cannot do large fluffy clouds).

[John Dollus]

Vue has a bit of a scale issue that can play havoc with architectural scenes. Best approach seems to be to create an object of known size first and import that into Vue to establish your scene scale.

Xstream tends to perform an 'automated exit' quite a bit and only supports Mental Ray at the moment, I believe.

 

Vue is more similar to World Builder than anything else if anyone remembers using the connection utility for that one....

[Devin Johnston]

John what version of Vue are you using?

 

What about Vue's native GI engine, does it do a good job, is it slow or fast?

 

From the demo's I've seen there is supposed to be a flawless link between Vue and Xstream, are you saying it isn't so? What would the work flow be like if I wanted to put a building into a Vue environment and use the Vue GI engine?

[John Dollus]

I used 5 for a bit up to about a month ago so there may be some service packs to address the stability of Xstream that i am not aware of. I also noticed that they will be showing version 6 at Siggraph and have started the free upgrade period so it should probably ship sometime around Oct or Nov.

 

One thing I wanted to try at the time was to render a composite pass with Max-MR-Vue to get the interaction and render a beauty pass for the architecture with Vray but ran out of time. I think that might be the best of both worlds.

Importing objects into Vue was the most stable and the renderings looked great but the render time within Vue was quite a bit slower than using anything else. I don't remember the exact difference but I think a rendering of only the architecture in Max was something like 15 mins and it ended up being about 30 mins. in Vue. With new software there are always new optimizations, though, so take it as law.

I also used Vue a few years ago in it's early stages for creating animated skies and ended up rendering 4x video res and sampling the result down in post to get nice backgrounds that would render quickly.

 

-edit-

 

Important note: I was mainly interested in the vegetation and environmental aspects (which looked great) and did not try out how the integration worked with complex topos.

[AJLynn]

I've demo'ed Vue. It has its strengths and weaknesses.

 

First off, as a tool for interiors it is way behind Vray and FinalRender - I wouldn't use it for that, only for exteriors.

 

When doing exteriors, its greatest strength of course is its ability to do terrain and foliage, and its lighting environment settings.

 

Terrain: There is a terrain sculpting tool, and the ability to import geometry and use it as your terrain. If there is water, you can set a water level, insert water, use a water shader on it, and it will produce a great result easily. You can have foliage falloff elevations and snow lines. It handles all of this well enough that you can use it as backdrop material without much performance hit. For smaller scale scenes, you can do a hill pretty easily. I never tried making a road.

 

Foliage: You have a ton of plants, trees and grasses, and you can customize a lot of parameters. It's a procedural/parametric foliage system. There is a system I've never seen elsewhere to define a full foliage environment procedurally. Use a preset, edit a preset or work from scratch. Define grass and/or groundcover, bush types, flowering plants, tree types, relation of elevation to foliage, what happens when you hit water, etc. Choose the terrain where all this goes and it's populated automagically. Waaaaay cool. You can also set up all your foliage manually. All foliage animates in the wind.

 

Lighting Environments: If you've tried Cinema's sky system, it has similar capabilities, plus a couple different ways of doing/faking GI. Lots of presets with sky, sun, environment effects and GI included, all editable and you can set up your own. The GI engine is pretty slow.

 

There is a distributed render system called Infinite Render Cow. It works in very large buckets - actually, more like the facet camera method in Cinema, but automated like the distributed scanlines in Backburner. It's reasonably stable. Number of nodes is limited, and as I've said it's slow, so with the number of nodes you have you would feel an overwhelming urge to buy more Cows and start referring to your Render Herd.

 

Again, I stress that this is a great program if you do a lot of exteriors that involve a lot of natural environment, but it's not the way to go if interiors are your primary concern.

[Devin Johnston]

Right now our focus is to be able to create convincing environments that our buildings can inhabit. Vue seems to be an all in one package that can handle everything at one time without doing a lot of compositing. If there is any better option out there now is the time to tell me.

[John Dollus]

In the Cgarchitect gallery, Mark Rich has a few renderings using Vue w/Lightwave. Maybe email him and ask him about his experiences with it.

[alekzab]

one word dude VRAY!

it renders fast and you have alot of control over your rendering params.

[Justin Hunt]

Very interesting comments on Vue,

 

alekzab - yes, yes we all know that, lets move on to the other aspects of the request

 

How does Max react if Vue environments are brought in and rendered with Vray? I am thinking best of both worlds

 

JHV

[Devin Johnston]

Actually I found out that Max will only work with Vue either through its own GI or radiosity engine, or through Mental Ray. There is no support for Vray or Final Render or Maxwell (which I didn't expect) so I'm a little disappointed about that. One positive note is that Vue 6 is scheduled to be released some time in August and it's a free upgrade from 5 to 6. Maybe in the new version they will support more than just Mental Ray.

 

By the way thanks John I was able to talk to Mark and he had nothing but positive comments to make about Vue. I’m actually feeling pretty good about this now, just the thought of being able to create full environments is a dream come true. I will have to purchase additional Render Cow nodes for the farm, but if the quality holds up it will be well worth it.

 

I also want to thank all of your for your input, I really value the opinions of everyone here. I've decided to go ahead and purchase Vue and I'm going to see if I can make Maxwell work for now. If it turns out that it's imposable I'm going to go ahead with Vray and start fresh.

[Justin Hunt]

Thanks for letting us know, seeing that the bulk of my work is done with Metal I am considering this a bit more.

 

JHV

[tecton3d]

good luck to you Devin! Please keep us informed as to how things turn out for you with your experiments with Vue and Maxwell in a production environment

 

cheers!

[DavidR]

At the moment I am thinking/working out a very complex material for weathered floorboards that takes into account dusk, wear and tear, splits around the nails, uneven reflections that combine both glossy and sharp reflections, the list goes on.

I Vray is great for lighting but falls short in materials.

JHV

 

I use Vray for shiny, new aircraft interiors, so the materials are very simple compared to what you need. I must admit that I'm intrigued by mental ray's 72 shaders and Brazil's skin, velvet, wax, etc, but Vray works best for my needs. Vray 1.5 is supposed to have more advanced materials, whatever that may mean, but at this point waiting for 1.5 is like waiting to buy a Bitboys graphics card It seems I read somewhere that Vue would support Vray soon. Anyone else see that?

[DavidR]

Right now our focus is to be able to create convincing environments that our buildings can inhabit. Vue seems to be an all in one package that can handle everything at one time without doing a lot of compositing. If there is any better option out there now is the time to tell me.

It sounds like Vue may be all you need, and as far as something more advanced, ILM is using it for exteriors, so I doubt there's anything better.

[Devin Johnston]

That's a great point!