Tropical Island - to Vue or not to Vue

[Adam H. Stewart]

This might be a bit of retorical question, I know there have been a few talking about Vue XStream and Vray intergration. I have to create a tropical Island ( from the pacific to be precise - for a special feature on the DVD for the upcoming Pacific series - made by the HBO ). The island will function as an education guide to battles, as some points it will be viewed like a map from way up and then zooming into close up's for key story elements.

The question is has anybody got a pretty good working knowledge of the Vue XStream- I just downloaded the demo and here that it can be buggy - it's a pain in the ass that is doesn't work with Vray - so it sounds like I'll be stuck working solely in it for rendering and animation, which scares me as I'll be rendering 1920x1080 and the finished animation will be at least a couple of minutes long, it will have to network render the bugger.

Am I better sticking with what I know and just using a massive slew of instanced tree Storm palm trees ?

Thanks as always for you're help

Adam

[beestee]

If you haven't yet, take a look at what is being done with VRayScatter 2.0. It may be an option in this situation considering their new stance on render node licensing.

[sv]

We looked into Vue for a recent job, but in the end decided just to go wth Max / Vray - just having the control over the rendering that Max/Vray gives you just makes more sense in my opinion...
Just use a truck load of animated proxies in Xref files, and it'll be quick and easy to work with...

[Adam H. Stewart]

thanks guys - I wasn't aware that vray supports animated proxies - that's sweet news. I'll do a little test and see what I can up with. Hunting around it seems as though Vue is a great one trick pony, but I can really see how net rendering could be the show stopper - I hate the idea of having to deal with learning a new software, especially if it is anyway unstable - it takes years off you're life.
I haven't looked a VrayScatter 2 - I'll defo check it out. I forgot to mention that I have Dreamscape on my rig, although I've had mixed results with it, maybe I can achieve something interesting with that.

Thanks a million for you're help

Adam

[trick]

You certainly have to look at GroundWiz (www.gugila.com) too. Next to support for VRay Proxies it also has features for texturing large landscapes. They have some examples of tropical islands too. Compared to VRayScatter (I use both) it has it's pros and cons. Both offer demo's !!

[Adam H. Stewart]

sweet - I just came across ground wiz, it looks really interesting, I'm very interested in keeping everything inside max and vray if I can, these tools look like they can help achieve very similar results without the headache of dealing with new software. I've downloaded the demo's and will give them a whirl before I go to the Vue

thanks again


Adam

[redi]

I have been dabbling in the "dark side" of max/vue/mentalray integration. I can tell you that Vue7 Xstream is still buggy, but the integration between vue/max is much better than it was with Vue 6. In fact I couldn't really get it too work at all in Vue 6. But with Vue 7 I can now paint ecosystems in my max viewports, which is great. You can also edit your vue materials from within max and much more. However you have to use the evil MentalRay for rendering. I rendered a small animation via backburner and it looks promising, some flickering on the foliage, but I think I can tweak that away. There is a very helpful guy on the e-on forums (karim cheikh djavadi) who posted this stuff and more on his site:

http://www.iconrange.com/vue/offraod.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/note/anim.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/sun_setting.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/ps_comp.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/desert_ren.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/victor_project.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/villa-victor4.jpg
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/bh/blackHawk.rar
http://www.iconrange.com/vue/blackHawk.jpg


It should give you an idea of how the whole max/vue thing hangs together

[Neilg]

I spent a few days doing some r&d into vue a few weeks ago.

Cant stand the piece of shit now, just headache after headache followed by results I couldve matched or beaten with max/vray.
Just use proxies, if you need more control use scatter 2.0 and groundwiz.

[Infrared digital]

I have thrown myself head and shoulders into Vue 7 and find it fantastic but a very poisoned chalice. On one hand you can get amazing results very very quickly but on the other there are a number of problems.

I agree that the integration in Vue 6 was not workable and they have ironed alot of this out in 7 but some bugs persist.

The most distasteful thing I have found is E-ons pricing structure;

1 x Vue7Xstream £ 800 approx

1 x Render Server £ 350 approx (basically backburner but you have to pay for it).

10 x Render nodes at £ 105 each = £ 1050

Total = £ 2200 approx !!!!

I find this unreal especially because Vue does take quite a bit of time to render and therefore definitely needs to be rendered over a network especially if you are doing animations.

Redi, you mentioned that you rendered over the network from Mental ray with Vue content - how did you do that ? Was it using the mental ray satellites ?

[Adam H. Stewart]

Great info - I did some tests with Scatter 2 and really like it, haven't had a chance to check out groundworks yet - I have to admit that anything that needs to be licensed per rendernode it pretty much a non starter for me. It always ends up being a complete pain in the ass to install and maintain and our rendernodes just aren't that fast, so you're paying for a really slow machine ( I suppose that isn't the softwares fault ) - the idea of being limited at rendertime turns my stomach, I've dealt with so many problems trying to get mental ray for maya rendered, when I'm limited in network rendering I just don't use it.

thanks again for all you're help

Adam

[duke2]

The Groundwiz Lite material thingo is pretty cool. You can get around some of the restrictions it has by using the map as a mask for textures rather than doing it all inside of their map. So GW combined with VRS2.0 beats Vue hands down for me. Aside from clouds I guess.

[vlado]

Ah, good that you mentioned clouds:



Best regards,
Vlado

[jow]

I wondered how long it would be before this got mentioned

[dlparisi]

Vlado, you tease...

[Adam H. Stewart]

Clouds the final frontier

Wow !

I was just thinking about how great the sun / sky system would look with a few clouds scattered around - great stuff to come :] - exactly why 3D is a drug that you just can't give up, there is always something great coming down that pipe that keeps you up late at night dreaming about

Can't wait for the clouds to roll in !