VUE 6 - Personal Learning Edition

[jinsley]

Good morning all,

 

Was just browsing through a recent edition of Advanced Photoshop (excellent resource by the way!) and found a small article on VUE 6...

 

There is a personal learning edition available, if anyone has not used this software before I would highly recommend that you check it out. It takes your scenery and animations to the next level.

 

Here's a link:

 

http://www.vue6.com/ple

 

Enjoy!

[Devin Johnston]

First let me say that the Vue demo is beautiful and it's the main reason I purchased Vue 5 a few years ago. Vue has the capability of creating amazing 3d environments that are unparalleled by anything else out there, unfortunately that is where its usefulness ends. If you are like me when you saw this you immediately thought that all your problems relating to scene context and environment creation were over. I found out the hard way just how difficult it is to bring in a 3D architectural model and set it up for animation in the way eon has presented it. There are serious problems when it comes to scale and how Vue imports and handles your models, the clunckiness of the Vue interface is also hard to get used to. Rendering times can be excessive when high quality settings are used and that means buying additional rendercow licenses which aren't cheep. Vue does have a camera import function that is supposed to allow you to sink up your camera with one you export from another application so that you can do composite shots. After days of trying to get that to work I had to abandon it because it simply didn’t or wouldn’t work.

 

Vue could be one of the most powerful rendering programs out there if it wern't for these problems. I still have hopes that Eon will get a clue and either creates a plugin for Max that offers more options for rendering than Mental Ray, or fix the existing problems inside Vue so that bringing in models or sinking up cameras is practical.

[aldofarias82]

wow, thats very disapointing.

i was looking forward to it (same expectations you mentioned).

[STRAT]

we've used vue 6 a couple of times in a few images purely to render out foliage and stuff.

 

as mentioned above, it's unrivaled. it's foliage capabilities are amazing. and easy.

 

but heck.....SSSLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!! (even on multi processing platforms). and it's stability is a laugh. constant crashing.

But if it's render engine wasn't as painfully slow we'd use it in anger allot more. such potential.

[Noise]

I was testing Vue Xstream PLE last weekend and must admit to being blown away by its results and was about to purchase it pretty soon.

 

Although I had heard about the scale issues I reckon that its better to find a workaround rather than ever relying on onyx tree or xfrog which, I could never render a full scene with vegetation with those models due to running out of RAM and crashing.

 

I'm definitely going to persevere with Vue until I hit a brick wall because I cannot find anything else remotely like it.

 

N

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

We had the same SERIOUS problems, never could solve them.

 

Anyway, I am in contact with the people at E-on to work together on a useable workflow, so any tips are welcome of what and how you like is most welcome.

 

rgds,

 

nisus

[Noise]

Just wondering, are you bringing the Vue environment into Max via the Utilities tab ?

 

To get the scene to render in max do I have to set the renderer to Vue file renderer ?

[Mario Pende]

What kind of importing problems does Vue have?

[Noise]

Geometry saved from max will import into Vue at the wrong scale - obviously not good if you are trying to sync two programs together.

 

There is a part of the Utilities tab in max that allows Max to port to Vue but it is all over the place - not rendering and crashing when trying to update information. But, this may not be the best way to combine the two programs - I am not sure though as I have not used the two in conjunction.

[Devin Johnston]

Hi all,

 

We had the same SERIOUS problems, never could solve them.

 

Anyway, I am in contact with the people at E-on to work together on a useable workflow, so any tips are welcome of what and how you like is most welcome.

 

rgds,

 

nisus

 

This is good news because Vue could be such a powerful program for Arch Viz; first they need to find a way to easily import scenes into Vue at the correct scale and location. That would be a good start but the real power of Vue is in it's render engines or it's ability to handle large polly counts that would crash any other engine. I really want to be able to use Vue inside of Max and be able to access all of its functions like materials, sky, land and water extra, as well as it's render engines from there. It would also be great to be able to use Vue and Vray or Maxwell together.

 

The only other problem that Vue is going to have is how they have their licensing set up. It's not like Max or Vray where one license gives you unlimited render nodes, with Vue I think it comes with 5 CPU licenses. If you want more you have to buy them and they aren't cheap. However if they could get all of the other stuff done then I would be much more inclined to spending a few thousand to get some render cows.

[Mario Pende]

Finaly I see some MAX users that are not satisfied with something. LOL!

I dont use MAX, but do use Lightwave and I think I read that theres a very good integration between Vue and LW.

[mikedeerf]

Yeah, but I've READ that there's very good integration between Max and Vue, too. E-on puts that all over their marketing materials. In fact, that's why the company I work for purchased Vue 5 in the first place - so when they were ready to move up to Viz, we wouldn't have to re-create the wheel with trees, prototypical building models, etc.

 

Only problem is that from my experience (and apparently others on this site), the only place the integration seems to work is inside E-on's building. [shrug]

 

Niall, if you do find a workaround, PLEASE be sure to post your solution on these forums somewhere!

I did my first project in Vue; when the 2nd came around, I figured "hey, I've already got textures and trees setup in Vue - I'll landscape the site in Vue, then take it to Max for the better illumination and camera system, and bump-mapping and displacement." I had big visions of using the Vue engine to render out the massive vegetation, and Mental Ray for the hardscaping and grass, then putting it all together.

 

Instead, I spent half the budget trying to get it to work, ended up scrapping everything I had done in Vue and re-doing it all from scratch in Viz. I did export trees from Vue, but even exported at near-lowest quality, the polygon counts absolutely PUNISH Viz.

 

If I could have imported a Viz camera into Vue, life could have been grand. Or perhaps it DID import the camera right, just the scene wasn't in the right place or the right size. I dunno - hard to tell which was broken worse - the model import or the camera import. Either way, I curse that program for all the late-night rendering I've donated for free to this project to makeup the lost hours.

 

Anyway, in search of your workaround I'll offer this: if your system can't render Onyx or SpeedTrees, don't spend the time trying to render Vue trees in Max, either. I'd spend that time trying to go the other way (getting the Max model working with the Vue trees inside the Vue engine)

 

Good luck, and God bless you!

[mikedeerf]

Speaking of which, if you want to see the output differences, I'll shamelessly plug my own thread:

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/25588-my-first-2-projects-commercial-exteriors-vue-5-viz2008-mr.html

 

Seriously, though - the trees in those 2 projects are the same Vue species. The 1st pic shows them rendered from inside Vue 5 Infinite. For the other 2, they were exported at fairly low mesh and texture settings from Vue into Viz (and then stretched/rotated etc).

 

Comparing #1 and #3, you can see pretty significant differences - the trunk textures especially didn't translate well to Viz. Also, there are some weird artifacts in the tree canopies. On the other hand, The leaf color was easier to adjust in Viz. Oh, and Viz didn't crash without warning and (AND!) corrupt not only the current file, but the previous revision too, a single time. Actually DOING a Save As when you click "save as" - that's a pretty cool feature Autodesk should advertise more. I'm sorry, now I just sound bitter and petty...

I'm done now. :-)

[Devin Johnston]

Only problem is that from my experience (and apparently others on this site), the only place the integration seems to work is inside E-on's building. [shrug]

 

LOL

[Noise]

Has anyone had success with bringing in the environment/atmosphere without any vegetation ?

[mikedeerf]

That may work well. I started an experiment, then got sidetracked. But I had successfully exported a sky texture that looked really nice. I had elso exported a hex-sphere, but got off onto other things and never brought it into Viz.

But it seemed promising...

[Devin Johnston]

Mostly what I use Vue for is generating skies; I'll render out one in high resolution and save out a HDRI, Tiff & Jpeg. The skies are indistinguishable from real pictures and they work really well in both renderings and animations. The render times are relatively slow when you consider that you're just rendering out a sky but the quality is very good.

[Noise]

When you say that you save out a HDRI - is it just an image or is it an actual HDRI with the 16 or so fstops ?

[Claudio Branch]

E-on Software had a big booth at Siggraph.

 

Anyone happen to get any news on fixing xStream?

[Devin Johnston]

When you say that you save out a HDRI - is it just an image or is it an actual HDRI with the 16 or so fstops ?

 

It's a full HDRI just like you would buy from Dosch or anyone else who sells them. There are even options to save them out as a panorama or a spherical images.

[daniohayon]

It's a full HDRI just like you would buy from Dosch or anyone else who sells them. There are even options to save them out as a panorama or a spherical images.

 

What would be the least expensive package If sky render and HDRI is all you need?

[Devin Johnston]

Vue Infinite is what I've got and it $735 US, I'd say if you use alot of HDRI's or need good background sky's it's worth the price and with it you get all of the other stuff to.

[Noise]

Thanks for that Maxer.

 

Would it not be an option to use the Vue environment background and HDRI in Max to get the lighting matched then composite in the vegetation ?

 

I know this is a simplistic way of looking at it but the problems I have had with Xfrog and Onyx are so severe that this solution seem like a walk in the park.

 

Obviously, animations will require alot of forward planning and good compositing skills but we were going to have to do that anyway - due to the ram demands on rendering a scene with Onyx/Xfrog landscaping. Atleast with Vue - it will look bloody good but at a fraction of the time to create.

[Devin Johnston]

Yes you can create HDRI's and bring them into Max, yes you can export trees with low poly counts but the only way you can use Vue and Max together is through Mental Ray. If you’re using Mental Ray then there might be a chance that it will work but look at most of the posts on this so far, no one has been able to successfully establish a working workflow between the two programs. Originally my thoughts were that I would create the environments in Vue, the geometry in Max and sink up the cameras and lighting. This doesn’t work because cameras & geometry don't come in in the right locations in Vue so you can't clip anything out. As I said before the power of Vue is in its ability to handle large numbers of polygons which can number in the billions. There is no way to take advantage of this unless you are willing to do everything in Vue.

 

I really wish someone from Eon would read this thread and comment on the problems that we all know Vue has; or someone who is an expert user of Vue who can shed some light on these issues.

[Noise]

Ok, should be a basic problem to solve for them I would imagine.

 

I have been in touch with them but now this is the most important thing for them to concentrate on fixing.