Thoughts on Vue

[M V]

I have been eyeing Vue since version 6 and have always been curious about introducing it into my workflow. I downloaded their PLE version a couple of times and messed around with it a little and thought it was very interesting (and slow). The architectural rendering on their website is not all that impressive, which is what turns me off a little.

Does anyone have experience with using Vue in arch viz?

[Devin Johnston]

I purchased Vue 6 and after messing with it for over a year I was never able to produce anything usable. It had several issues at that time like it wouldn't import models at the proper scale, there was no way to reliably import or export cameras, and in order to render animations on a farm you had to buy render cow licenses which got really expensive. Those were the big ones but there were others like the UI was just bad and even at the highest settings the imagery wasn't as good as Vray. It's a great concept but they never worked out the bugs and it's just too expensive for what it does or doesn't do.

[notamondayfan]

I would use xsteam again if I got the chance, especially now it works properly with vray and mental ray. I would mainly use it for aerial short where you need to populate large expanses of forests, flowers, terrain. You can do this with vrayscatter, but vue has more functions to automate the process. One key feature is the Eco Systems, which means you set a load of parameters and it will populate the terrain, such as if the slope is too steep, then only small flowers will grow.

 

I found render times reasonable, and like with all render engines, it's just about understanding and tweeking the correct parameters best for your scene.

[Devin Johnston]

Dean do you still have to purchase additional render cow licenses if you have more than 5 render nodes? I'd like to see an example of what you've been able to do with it if that's possible.

[notamondayfan]

I haven't touched it for years sadly, Ill see if I can dig something out at some point.

 

Regarding nodes, I'm unsure about pricing, I ended up just devoting 1 machine to rendering the Vue part, and even then it was quite rapid. http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf this is a great resource and really helped me understand the settings a whole lot better.

[luckymutt]

I haven't done anything since Vue 7, but it was overall a good experience.

The Eco-System painting was excellent, but terrain and sky needed a bit of tweaking and getting used to. There was an issue of scale working between Max though. Not sure how it is now.

[vladin]

Vue is a very tricky piece of software, maybe because it's French, but once you get used to it, it becomes indispensable, especially for ( big master planning) aerial views. It has by far the most realistic rendering engine on the market- atmospherics, plants/ecosystems, liquids, procedurals... I would not use it on interiors though.

We are using the standalone version , as it eliminates all plugin middlemen synchronisation bugs, mismatches and crashes. Works best with Lightwave objects (LWO), as it can read some of the shader's properties,like colour, reflections,transparencies, textures, but obj format works almost as good if you are coming from 3ds max.

There is a great deal of confusion between every new release of Vue and the previous one,which make working with Vue a bit of a pain in the buttocks. For instance, in Vue6 all units were in decimetres ( scene, plants, objects, procedurals) which was okay, as all you had to do was just to scale objects by 0.1 when you were importing them into Vue. Then, in Vue7 or 8 they made the very clever move of changing just the scene units into metres, leaving all the rest in decimetres; the scaling upon import function became dysfunctional, i.e. it just wouldn't scale the objects in any way. As a result, you had your scene and objects in metres but all the rest had to be readjusted by a factor of 0.1 which worked in a very unpredictable way. You cannot use objects saved in Vue6 in later versions of the software, as they would be in a different scale.

There are plenty of little things that are really annoying but nevertheless, I would highly recommend Vue.

Below are a couple of images we've done some ages ago:

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue01.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue02.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue03.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue04.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue05.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue06.jpeg

[Devin Johnston]

Vladin were any of these animations? Those images are top notch there some of the best aerials I've ever seen, can you give me some idea of how long it took you to model and rend Vue06 for instance? Like I said before I tried using Vue 6 with little success, if my projects required extensive landscaping modeling I might have continued to use it but for everyday work it didn't work for me.

[danb4026]

I have had Vue since Vue 7 xstream and now have Vue 9 xstream. Their customer service costs too much money because you need an annual subscription, which is like $400 (crazy when you pay so much for the software itself).

 

I have always used it as a Max plugin and, perhaps, that is my mistake. I have found very little use for Vue so far. Originally I got it for its atmospheres. But they take way too long to render from within Max and it is just way simpler to use HDR's, Vray Sun and Sky and/or photoshop the background in.

 

Now, if Vladin could show me how he did those aerials, I would consider making the effort and giving Vue a 2nd chance. Right now it is just a paperweight.

[vladin]

Maxer,

none of them were developed into animations, though the models have a very good potential to turn them into hyper-realistic animations. We've done a few tests but nothing that special.

Have in mind that most of these images are 2-3 years old, so I cannot really remember exactly how long it took to render but what I remember is that it took quite a while, especially for a 5000 pix image.

Yes, you need to do some modeling but probably not much more than you would usually do when rendering in 3ds max.

 

Here's a quick tutorial on how the Croatian Dream project was done (vue05.jpg and vue06.jpg)> http://www.cornucopia3d.com/classroom/article.php?id=92&from=makingofs

 

Dan, I totally agree with you that HDRI's and Photoshop can do a equally good job if not a better one. In fact, we still do most of our aerials using 3D+Photoshop.

It is when you have really picky and pedantic clients demanding nothing less than photographic quality, when Vue comes in really handy.

And of course, Vue+Photoshop is a equally good and "legal" combination; below are a few more examples, all rendered in Vue >

 

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue07.jpeg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue08.jpg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue09.jpg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue10.jpg

http://www.vyonyx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/vue/vue11.jpg

Edited June 14, 2011 by vladin