Alternatives to vue for 3ds max?

[stayinwonderland]

hi,

 

I've been using vue inside 3ds max lately and have found it to be the most unstable use of computer software I've ever experienced. I've spent 2 days doing about 2 hours work.

 

Are there alternatives ways to decorate a scene with foliage and atmosphere?

 

One idea was to use a game engine.

 

Thoughts anyone?

[bpositive]

Though it cant do the same, using VrayScatter or Forestpack is a good way to add a lot of foliage and small details.

I use vray scatter and very happy with it, though you do need a good amount of memory..!

[David Arbogast]

I use and love Forest Pack. If a game engine's quality would suffice, try Lumion 3d. The current version already has some very nice atmospherics, but the upcoming v2 looks to be taking atmosphere's to another level; looks very impressive to me. It won't/can't look as great as environments created in Vue, but it sounds like Vue is a major headache. It's a real shame.

 

I would love to have a package like Vue Xstream running inside Max, but numerous accounts like yours makes me stay away. Does the standalone Vue Infinite work any better?

[Jesper Pedersen]

Hi Andy,

 

We've had the same experience with vue xStream! Incredibly frustrating as it simply has not worked for us and I feel support from e-on has been useless. We have been lured back and bought an upgrade at one stage, but same problems of instability had not been resolved as we had hoped. Then we bought CarbonScatter in the hope that a simplified version would be more stable, but alas it did not work for us either.

We are now working with ForestPack Pro and our first project has just been completed successfully (we still have a few small things to learn but and it does not nearly do what Vue promises. But what good are promises and a fab gallery if it does not delivery!?)

 

Jesper

[danb4026]

I have to agree with everything being said here as well. I have had Vue xStream since version 7 and have not been able to use it at all. It is way to heavy and the atmosphere's render incredibly slow within Max. It has been useless to me.

 

I, too, use Forest Pro and love it. It does not do atmospheres, but it is really great at placing and scattering foliage (or anything for that matter). It give you lots of control.

 

As far as atmospheres, I find it best to simply use HDRI's with max.

 

PS...I also hate their support, useless. And they charge and annual maintenance fee ($400+), which you also need in order to get product updates.

Edited December 16, 2011 by danb4026

[stayinwonderland]

Lots of great info, thanks guys (sidenote: wow, a helpful forum for a change). I tried Forest and it seemed great but then crashed, so I'm also thinking that my laptop is insufficient (vista, intel duo core, 3gb, 4 years old). So my new xmas laptop (Win7, i7, 8gb) will make a big difference.

 

Plus I wonder if the fact that using Vue crashed max so many times (I literally haven't closed it manually in about 40 instances) that it's broken the 3ds install lol.

 

With regards to that Lumion, worth noting that it costs a lot for even the cheap version, but, have we all considered Unreal Engine or Cry Engine? They're both free. My guess is that they don't contain a shed load of cool librarys though and Lumion does?

[stayinwonderland]

Does the standalone Vue Infinite work any better?

 

Yeah that's fine really. So if need be one could work seperately in vue and max... *shrug*

[David Arbogast]

With regards to that Lumion, worth noting that it costs a lot for even the cheap version, but, have we all considered Unreal Engine or Cry Engine? They're both free. My guess is that they don't contain a shed load of cool librarys though and Lumion does?

I think you've assessed that well. The way I see it Lumion is actually inexpensive visualization software that also comes with a huge library of objects, environments, materials, and effects. Altogether it is expensive, but it seems reasonable considering the mass of content.

 

BTW, this Monday Lumion 3d is announcing the release of version 2, so check out their website then. I am really impressed by how much they have improved the software since it was first released. Still, it's only a game engine (uniquely designed for arch viz.) with nice, but not great, image quality (compared to 3ds Max/Vray). But, then again 3ds max/Vray can't compare with the stunning rendering speed of Lumion (1080p frames render in seconds on my PC).

Edited December 17, 2011 by David Arbogast

[danb4026]

Can you import landscapes into Max from Lumion? I am not sure what you would use Lumion for in an arch viz workflow with Max.

My interest would lie in bringing in realistic sea water and hills/mountainous terrain. Not sure what else it is useful for.

[stayinwonderland]

Well, I haven't used lumion but how the workflow goes is the opposite way round (correct me if i'm wrong). You export from max into lumion (your buildings) and lumion then 'scenifies' the living shit out of it - adding trees, atmos and the like. And in real-time so you can create easy animations. Not sure if you can export an interactive walk-around though? That you CAN do in UDK or CryEngine though.

[danb4026]

That's what I thought. Without being able

to create a rendering (still image) of the quality

Possible with Max and either vray or MR, I

Cannot see it being valuable to me.

[David Arbogast]

You are right again Andy. Lumion can produce rendered animations, but cannot deliver an interactive export. Whether you use UDK or CryEngine or Lumion, you'll definitely want to upgrade your video card to the best Nvidia Geforce card you can afford. I upgraded mine to an EVGA 3gb GTX 580, and it makes moving around in the Lumion environment effortless.

 

Daniel, Lumion was made specifically for Arch Viz workflows. You can import geometry from Max, Revit, Sketchup, Maya, etc. I was up all night last night playing around with Lumion 2, importing buildings from Revit and a 3d landscape that I had modeled in Max (along with roads, curbs) using FBX format. It was flawless. All the maps and uvw mapping came through perfectly. When I had tried Lumion 1 - free version - importing was not as flawless (missing faces, flickering faces, etc.), but so far everything is coming in perfectly in version 2.

 

I've been on the fence about Lumion for months and finally purchased a license yesterday morning. Little did I know that version 2 would be released the same day! So far I'm really impressed.

[danb4026]

David, what I don't understand is once you

import from Max to Lumion, what do you render out?

What is the final product? Can you render out a final high quality image?

Or is the point only for quick animations?

[David Arbogast]

David, what I don't understand is once you

import from Max to Lumion, what do you render out?

What is the final product? Can you render out a final high quality image?

Or is the point only for quick animations?

You can render out stills, and that may have some usability for me. It's still just a game-engine based rendering program, so it's a far cry from 3ds Max/Vray from a quality/artistic standpoint. So, yeah, my thought is to use it as a way of quickly producing nice-but-not-awesome animations.

 

It's a great fit for me because I work in large AE firm and the ability to develop a nice animation can be a powerful aid towards winning new projects. But, time - especially marketing time - is very limited for these proposals, so we have never developed animations for them in the past. Lumion, then, becomes a game-changer. In a few hours I can get the same Max model I've used for rendered stills into Lumion and render out animation sequences (mp4). With Lumion you are sacrificing image quality, but in return you get incredible rendering speed. The key question I've been asking myself for months is: can I live with the image quality? Well, I finally conclued that the image quality is good enough for our needs; especially since the rendering speed delivers such a huge advantage over trying to create Vray animations of any substantial length.

 

Also, the one of the reasons I went with Lumion over against CryEngine or Unity is the expediency of the workflow. Learning Lumion to the point of being productive takes just a few hours. I don't think working with CryEngine or Unity can match that. So, Lumion scores a lot of points with me because it renders animations insanely fast and is incredibly easy and intuitive to use.

 

The only workflow hiccup I've experienced thus far is that I use Vray for my still renderings, and Lumion doesn't import Vray materials, which is no surprise. So, I do have to prep my Max models by converting to Mental Ray. But, my Vray shaders are often pretty layered, so I'd need to dumb-down the materials for Lumion anyway (for exporting materials all I really care about is getting my diffuse channel ported over). I haven't tried importing native Max models in Lumion 2 yet. When I tried it in Lumion 1 - free version - it didn't work well at all. FBX and Collada importing work great though. Another thing I like about the Lumion import process is that it functions a lot like file-linking with 3ds Max (as in a Revit-to-Max file-linking). So, you can import a model into Lumion, go back to Max and modify the model and re-export it, then tell Lumion to re-update the model. The geometry gets updated, but any material edits made in Lumion are retained. Pretty slick!

 

I hope I'm not talking like a salesman; that is just about the last thing I'd want to do. It's a great fit for me because I work in the context of an AE company where animations are useful towards the goal of winning new AE projects. If I were a self-employed visualization artist, it might not have as clear of a role for me. Frankly, I love/prefer still imagery and want to continue spending most of my time improving my craft at that with the 3ds Max/Vray toolset. So, having a tool that lets me produce decent-looking animations to supplement my still renderings with minimal time-investment is a really powerful asset to me. Everyone's situation is different though.

[danb4026]

Well David, my goals are pretty similar to yours, even though I am a self employed viz artist and not with an AE company. But, I too, use max with vray and concentrate on stills. Animations are just to much for just one person and my 2 machines to handle. But to quote you, " having a tool that lets me produce decent-looking animations to supplement my still renderings with minimal time-investment is a really powerful asset to me ". This might be a way to delve into animations without taking too much time from my bread and butter.

 

I saw the tutorials on Lumion's site, but they seem pretty basic. Did you find any other helpful resources to get you started?

[David Arbogast]

I saw the tutorials on Lumion's site, but they seem pretty basic. Did you find any other helpful resources to get you started?

Not really. There's a disappointing lack of those resources; they don't even have a user manual yet! Best thing to do, I think, is download the free version and start playing around with it. You'll probably find it to be pretty easy. I'll say this: when I tried the free version I was a little frustrated with some missing and flickering polygon faces. They were correctable. So far in version 2 everything is animating without flickering or missing faces, including a building model I imported straight from Revit. Also the sky in version 2 is much much improved; it's actually quite beautiful.

[jlns]

The difference is in the price - Cryengine is really nice, but a major pain for model export from Max. It is also very expensive - 10's of thousands of dollars per seat/year.

Compared to UDK and Cryengine, Lumion is the best. The price is much more reasonable and it handles geometry very well. It is not quite up to the same image quality as the other game engines, but I assume it will get much better in the future.