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any Vue users?


STRAT
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Sorry for butting in but we are in the process of changing our tree plug-in for Max from Speedtree to something else and we were looking into Onyx but I keep reading great things from VUE and VUE xtream (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/xstream/vue_5_xstream_plugins/).

 

I was wondering if it is a good software to use in both stills and animations and how it would copare with speedtree or onyx.

 

thanks in advance!

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If you’re looking for a plug-in then go with Onyx Tree I think your going to be much happier with it, I sure am. Vue is a funny program, it's advertised as the final answer to the whole environment problem and within its own world it is. It isn't until you try and use it with Max that you run into major problems. Vue has a plug-in called Xtream which is supposed to seamlessly integrated Vue into Max, what they don't tell you is that you have to use the Mental Ray engine to render anything out in Max. It's an extremely clumsy plug-in and was of little value to me since I don't use Mental Ray. You can export the Vue trees as 3DS files which I have done and use every once in a while, but the Onyx trees are much more detailed and easier to import and change. Vue has a great render engine capable of rendering out Billions of polygons which Max could never do, however bringing in geometry into Vue is very difficult because of scale factor problems that they haven't fixed. The only thing I really use Vue for is rendering out sky backgrounds which it's very good at and look totally real. I have exported several trees that I use but it's much cheaper to just go with Onyx, you get a bigger library of trees and they are infinitely editable and they react with wind in animations which the Vue trees can't do.

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ok

 

i have a few nice basic trees in Vue that i want exported into Cinema4d

 

how best to achieve this? the mesh exports fine into another app, but it's UV mapping is all to cock. In fact, the tree mesh comes in as a single entity with a single UV mapped material. this just isn't flexible.

 

I wouldn't mind too much, but the UV mapping becomes distorted during the export process. ie, the leaves map fine, but the trunk mapping is all messed up. and i cant edit it as the mesh is a single entity. can i separate tree's elements out into separate components for exporting maybe?

 

so then i tried baking the trees to separate objects, but even after optomising them to smaller elements than the tree as a whole, i still had megga exporting problems.

 

how best to go from Vue then?

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I've had the same problem in max, what I did was separate the trunk and branches from the canopy and I applied a different bark texture because the one that is exported from Vue just sucks. Then I just added a new UVW map to them and everything looked good, this is an example of what I was able to get out of Vue after I fixed everything.

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it renders through c4d like using proxy or xref methods. basically, you set up your vue scene in vue, add lights and textures etc etc in vue until it looks good, then save as a vue file.

 

Then in Cinema, click on the vue plugin and open vue scene option. it opens your saved vue scene in cinema, but it's basically a 'pseudo' image. All you see in C4d's O.M. is a vue camera and light. there's no tangible mesh or materials in sight. but, in the cam view, the vue scene is all there, even though in cinema you cant do anything with it.

 

but you can now add resident C4d elements to the same scene to interact. the vue elements will be light using the vue lighting settings, and the c4d elements lit using cinema's lighting.

 

it's pretty nifty. but, rendering a vue foliage scene through cinema, even with basic AA, takes an age. and hey, you use vue as a foliage engine in the first place realistically.

 

personally, i'd model and render foliage in vue only (it's pretty quick and almost photo real) and render my building in cinema, then comp the 2 together later on.

 

thats the point of this post - because vue foliage is jaw droppingly easy and beautiful in vue, i'm looking for tangible methods of transporting it into cinema.

 

 

i'm still probably a million miles out in my assessment here as i'm a very new vue dabbler. so please correct me if im out.

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The product literature for 6 makes the max integration sound great.

 

I used Vue 4 and the product literature made the integration sound great and it was horrible. Terrible. I used it for skies and it was nice for that. Basically at that time you were supposed to be able to import models into Vue and render but anything more complicated than a simple primative was blown apart in the process. I read the literature about how now 5 was supposed to be a cure all for everything but then I started hearing little protests saying it wasn't as seemless as it was presented. After the frustration of 4 I knew I would be very wary of using anything from them again.

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I'm using 6 and I haven't found it any easier to import or export models. There is a plug-in for Max that comes with Vue that is supposed to allow you to sink up cameras with Vue cameras so that you can render out elements in both programs and combine them later. The plug-in simply doesn’t work, you can bring in Max geometry into view and even cameras but the scale factors are all wrong and when you try to adjust them everything goes haywire. This is a separate plugin from the Xtream plugin which is supposed to allow you to use Vue inside of Max. Again this only works if you want to use Mental Ray which kind of defeats the purpose of having a program like Vue if you can’t use it’s render engine. If anyone using Max and Vue has had a different experience I'm very interested to hear it because I'd like to get some use out of this program other than exporting trees and making sky's. Yes the promotional materials that Eon has put together for Vue makes it look spectacular but in reality the linkage between the Vue and other 3D packages just isn't there unless you’re using Mental Ray.

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Vue has several different engines from a kind of standard scan line to Radiosity and GI but they don't compare to Vray or Final Render and 3D Studio's radiosity is much better. The Vue engine is capable of rendering scenes that would kill any other render engine though with poly counts in the Billions, so it has at least one advantage. Vue also has a pretty good material editor that makes heavy use of procedurals to produce most of it's textures.

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Are you using Windows XP or XP64 because I'm using XP64 and I haven't experienced much crashing at all with Vue 6,

 

nope, on normal winXP. and i wont be on XP64 in the near future either.

All i want Vue for is adding foliage to my imagery. be that exported out into cinema or rendered in Vue and comped later on. i dont want Vue for major archi rendering or gi or animation or anything. purely for foliage and environmental stuff.

 

as i said earlier, would Vue 4.5 or 5 do me better? and be more stable maybe? and less complex for my pc's resources? or am i generally buggered whichever way?

 

thanks :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

We have Vue 5 Infinite here. I had terrible stability problems when my machine had 1 GB of memory. I was able to get a usable image out of it by borrowing a coworker's memory chips while he was at a meeting.

2 GB of memory seems to help the stability. It doesn't make anything faster, but usable.

 

Of course you may already have 2 GB of memory. If so, I'm not sure what to say...

 

Anyway, I haven't used 6 but I'm not sure 5 is the answer...

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