Tropical Island - to Vue or not to Vue

[Adam H. Stewart]

Many a trure word is said in jest !!

As a German in a youthhostel said to me 15 years ago when he was trying to light is cigarette - "Give me Fire" :]

[Sascha Selent]

As a German in a youthhostel said to me 15 years ago when he was trying to light is cigarette - "Give me Fire" :]

Yeees, the germans. They are heavy on the wire.

Like Casablanca: "How many watches have we?" - "Ten watches" - "Such much?"

Geheheh...

[Adam H. Stewart]

But man do they know how to paartay - my best New Year ever was spent in Berlin - over a million people on the street, everybody drunk, no fights and if you saw somebody throwing rubbish on the ground it was probably an Italian :]

Two hot blonde police women where collecting for a police charity, they'd charge 2 euro for a drunk driving test - if you weren't drunk enough they gave you shit !

The day that happens in Los Angeles I'll eat my motorbike helmet :]

[Sascha Selent]

Ui!

HAHA!
Okay, sounds nice. Yeah Berlin is quite cool, but it´s definitely different from the rest of germany!

[Bathyscaph]

Wow, can't wait play with some VRay clouds.

Vue is evil, in case you haven't heard that before. It is really just a dirty little veg-tease. It promises so much but almost every part of the program is bug-ridden making it hard to actually use. Think of it as a slot machine calculated to make you think it's going to payoff. It gives you just enough encouragement to keep you pulling the lever but in the end you'll lose and it'll leave you broken-down and used up.

I am not upgrading to VUE 7 Xtreme, especially not for $600. Since it's been used in a few high-end production they now seem to be pitching it as a high-end tool which it is not. It is experimental software that kind of almost works and in some cases works great perhaps, but I found that the program failed me more often than not.

I was trying to render a large panorama since the tool doesn't render cubemaps which would have been so much easier to generate. I tried distributed rendering but that kept breaking on large images. You would think large images would be ideal for distributed rendering but in VUE I'd just get crashes. The only way I could render my image was to use a goofy render mode where VUE rendered in the background on my main machine using a single processor. So what could have taken hours by using my renderfarm took days instead. Everything in VUE is kind of like that - promising features rendered worthless by some inane bug or oversight or thoughtless limitation.

The skies are nice. I'll say that much. Vue IS handy for little bits here and there.

Unless your expectations are low or you have tons, and tons of time to find, diagnose and workaround the myriad bugs stay clear of Vue.

[sjmoir]

I'm not going to bother upgrading to xstream7. I just can't be bothered with that program anymore. Check this thread out for Tropical Islands;

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ad.php?t=41414

[jacksc02]

dont give up on vue just yet.......
A little birdy told me something good is on the way for US errmmm users of a certain renderer...... (wish i could say more)

[trick]

dont give up on vue just yet.......
A little birdy told me something good is on the way for US errmmm users of a certain renderer...... (wish i could say more)

I hope all crashes and headaches coming from any possible future combination of Vue and VRay are directed towards E-On. Otherwise I'm afraid this will cost precious VRay development time ... and developer life I got a free Vue Infinite in the past and I learned to have strong nerves and an endless breath to finish a decent project in it...Even the simple Ozone sky generator for Lightwave and Max crash almost instantly...in both applications. And paying per rendernode for a Mental Ray sky generator ???

[Stoo]

Some interesting stuff on here, I have to say. Some years ago I tried the first version of xStream and it was flakier than Flaky McFlake, the 99 with flake specialist, a truly awful piece of software.

At this point in time I am writing a comparison and analysis between VRay Scatter, Vue and GroundWiz which has just come up on the rails - Once the initial written work is done (in terms of an overview of what each piece of software claims it can do) we'll test.

From what I've read, I err on the side of VRay Scatter although the "5,000,000,000,000" thread doesn't make for brilliant reading at times whilst I do have to contend with a Vue fanboi as well though both of us will be going in to this exercise fresh and as unbiased as we can. Well, hopefully anyway...

Is there any other app' that I should consider as part of this investigation?

[Adam H. Stewart]

It looks as though the tropical Island project is a go ... Oh Shit !
I am currently leaning towards Ground Wiz, I have the demo downloaded and ready to test( been too busy making a another shiny shiny logo :[ ) Vray Scatter is interesting but seems way too simple - maybe I'm missing something, it seems really really simple - which in one way is good, but in another way I feel cheated when I have to pay for rendernodes and doubly so if I have to pay for rendernodes on something so simple

Unless ground wiz just absolutely blows .... I'll be going with what I know instead of toying with the slot machine - I love that anology by the way Bathyscaph - God knows I've played with enough of them in my time, by software style and Vegas style :]

[dcullipher]

We own both Groundwiz and Vray Scatter. Each has its strength in my opinion but coming from the artists I can tell you the following:

(this is our experience only so hopefully will be seen as objective input)

1) Groundwiz has a major feature oh being able to generate terrain from DEM maps, this is really helpful for creating a realistic base ground as you are using real information.

2) You can also shade differently based on height with GroundWiz, kinda like Vue.

3) You can paint the instances of groundwiz planters for detail placement of your objects.

4) Vray Scatter excels in the case of a VERY LARGE number of proxies where GroundWiz can start to chug or not render.

So our workflow would be to buildout the vast groups of trees with scatter and then do detailing and foreground with groundwiz. They are both very reasonably priced so hopefully you can work both into your budget.

Hope that helps.

[Morne]

it seems really really simple - which in one way is good, but in another way I feel cheated when I have to pay for rendernodes and doubly so if I have to pay for rendernodes on something so simple

Rendernodes are free with VRayScatter 2.0

[Bathyscaph]

Great thread. I love the MotorStorm vegetation example.

One really great app for generating terrain is World Machine 2. With it you can generate an amazingly detailed terrain using some simple but sophisticated procedural tools in combination with bezier masks, etc. It's an amazing little program since it builds an entire world from your procedural setup. You then can choose which part of the world you want to work with and then flesh it out with a combination of refinement tools.

With the professional edition (about $200) there really is no limit to how big a map you can make.

I'm not an expert with this app yet but, so far, it lives up to its promise. I am able to generate high-quality displacement maps and render them in VRay without issue. Worth looking into for anyone doing terrain and the basic version of the app is free for non-commercial work.

http://www.world-machine.com/

[alfabeta]

Ah, good that you mentioned clouds:



Best regards,
Vlado

Oooo... nice! Now, if we also could have a good sea surface, then I can ditch Dreamscape too. There would be no use for Vue at all in fact

[Adam H. Stewart]

Damn I didn't realize that rendernodes where free with VrayScatter I must have read that part of the site wrong my bad.
Great info on workflow dcullipher, I'm sure we can get both of these if I pust them as the Vue killer - I know we'd be spending significantly more on Vue. I can't wait to start my testing again - very excited to check out the machine world app and if I didn't mention it before that motorWorld example was just way too damn cool, I'm afraid to show it to my producer as he'll be raising the bar it's already a little to damn high for my liking

Thanks again for all you're help