What makes Vue 5 so powerful compared to Maya?

[Goon]

Somehow I'm doubting that they are actually displaying 3 billion polygons. Is that a rendertime stat, or did they specifically say that the viewport was displaying billions? Also, most of those polys are vegetation, which probably means that they are instantiated, so it might be a case like those outrageous Vray and Brazil tests where they render several billion as well.

[rebb]

I would imagine that Vue is explicitly built for handling large Scenes with essentially the same Objects over and over again ( in this Case, the Trees ).

Newer Graphics Cards can display the same Objects ( even if they are rotated / translated differently ) very very fast, and i guess Vue uses just this fact.

How fast is Vue when it has to handle the same Polycount, but it is made up of a different Object for each of the "Trees" ?

My guess is, it would run just as "slow" as Maya..

[sacslacker]

It actually handles large scenes very well. However I do believe it is because it is fully optimized for object instancing and all of that jazz.

[Lyr]

Yes Vue5 is all about using instanced geometry to get that billions of polygons figure. If you want to get closer in maya you should probably used instanced geo as well.

[mill]

Yes Vue is using instanced geometry.
But every one of the trees are different shape.
Is it possible to do the same in Maya?

[butCherHeLL]

when I was at my first job at 1995 as a programmer.

a software engineer said me. dynamically way is the best and compatible way...

and during years of years.. I saw that dynamic development of and software is best way.

and maya... it is this... the most dynamic 3D software.

dynamic based software means no limit. it can explain why a version is unlimited :D


does other have no limit ?

...
so please nobody ask "can maya do this ?"

if someone ask this ,it means he/she dont know maya reallyabout its core.

maya is mel based 3D software. is open wide to develop for everybody.
because it has heart of mel is a really java like interpreter.


if it had limits. it could open in nanoseconds as Lightwave.
if it had had limits. it could refresh renderview aiblity while rendering inside maya renderView Panel.


whatever.... to compare both software ;
a human should know knowledge and experimenting much .

what ?

do you want a faster write ? than open notepad....
but if you need more than write... you need a word processor programme...

so if you just want to type.... use notepad.



if you want unlimited...
here is maya....
since 1981.... were you born after it ?

[mill]

Sorry for my terrible English.

I would like to know how to do the same thing in Maya.
If that is possible, it is very useful.
Because every time I modify the instanced geometry, the original mesh deforms as well.

[butCherHeLL]

there is unlimited ways and technics todo this in maya.
but you shall know the technics...

first of all.. try paintfx. also you can do your own paintfx model.it is a mel script.
than convert it to paintfxToPolygon operation.

also you can do randomize animated instanced models.
depends of your dreeam and ability...

you look at mel.

[davidbasalla]

Goon: in the article it says: " at this point you are running a scene that contains 2.7-3 billion polygons, yet Vue should still perform well on most systems...". Its a bit hard to tell from the screengrabs...

Lyr: For the trees in my scene I am using instances, but its still dog slow.

butCherHell:
your first post was a bit hard to understand. I didnt quite understand what notepad had to do with any of this?
yes, maya is very good at doing many things, but it is in fact crap at handling many objects at the same time. I believe this is due to the fact that Maya is designed to do so many things well, but not necessarily optimized to do one single thing very efficiently.
For my scene, Im using a mel script that scatters instances over a polygonal landscape, which is fairly straightforward. In fact the problem is not creating the trees but the actual handling of all that complexity (viewport is very slow, renders with mental ray take ages, as it has to export all the scene file data first). Yes, i could use paintFX but the moment I convert it to polys, I will have exactly the same problem.
I dont think Mel is the answer to the problem here. Possibly writing a Maya API plugin could help. At the moment Im looking at different ways to render the scene...

Im just writing an opengl program to see how many trees (and polygons) it can take on my machine. I think u can use Display Lists to instance objects cheaply.
If there's a huge performance difference over Maya, I might consider exporting them from OpenGl to rib and then use Renderman to render it. Unfortunately Ive harldy touched renderman so far, so might be an overly ambitious undertaking...
Probably an even better solution would be to use Renderman and substitute the trees at rendertime (so that in Maya or whatever, the trees are only represented as a point or box). Again, no idea how to do that, but seems to be done in Industry quite a lot.
Ive briefly looked at Maya's prerender scripts, but it still seems to do all those commands in the viewport as well, which is sort of defeating its purpose. Maybe Im not doing it right... :shrug:

anyway, thanks for all the input! Ill post again if I make any headway...

[Buexe]

Well, first of all 1.4 million polys is a lot of wood to chop. Second, your graphics card may chop a lot of wood in games, but ati cards are known to have a poor Maya performance and quality. I tried this amount of polys on my card ( wildcat 6110 ), which is also two years old and I get about 5 fps. I actually used Artisan on a 450.000 poly plane and I got 1 fps, doesn`t feel really intuitive ; ). Have you fiddled with the Interactive Shading options? They allow you to switch to Wireframe/BoundingBox while moving around with the camera. Also check your general and Maya display settings. They should suite to this kind of project. If this doesn`t help maybe you can chop your scene into smaller parts? But the prerender mel also sounds like a good solution.

Good luck
b
BTW I loved the cathedral! Great work!

[davidbasalla]

hi guys...
i made some headway on my project. I am now using renderman. It all takes a while to get used to, especially since texture mapping and stuff is all very awkward, but its fun. Its amazing how much faster renderman is at rendering stuff.
The scene below contains about 75 million polys and takes about 5 mins to render. Its nowhere near Vue's 3 billion yet, but its looking pretty dense already :)

http://stufftolookat.f2s.com/Dave/test22-07-05.jpg

[sacslacker]

Hey man, that's looking great. Thanks for keepnig us updated.

One question I have is - Is this geometry in Maya? Or are you using the Renderman instancing. I don't know Renderman but from what I've read there is a way to use a shader to instance geometry (I could be misunderstanding what I've read too). I'd really like to get into Renderman. The shader stuff really tempts the programmer side of me =)

[davidbasalla]

And another render update...
This time its a sort of overgrown volcano (not unlike the one seen in the Incredibles ;) ), still needs a bit work.

sacslacker: all the geometry is being added in at rendertime, so I dont actually see a single tree in my maya scene (except for the ones in the tree library that are being referenced). I dont think Im using Instancing, but dont really know enough about it myself :)
Im using Maya to query points on a surface and then writing out coordinates into a RIB file, so no shader work there.
Renderman is great fun and very powerful it seems (both scenes I posted were above 50 million polys). Its a big change from Maya tho, as everything is txt-based, so more something for the programmer inside you... :)

http://stufftolookat.f2s.com/Dave/VolcanoAtmosphere.jpg

[mthemelis]

Im using Maya to query points on a surface and then writing out coordinates into a RIB file, so no shader work there.



first of all, it's incredible work!!!

when you say query points on a surfacedo you mean spread particles or something else?
how do you write out the coordinates??

sorry for these silly questions but i'm not using renderman, however i 'm interested inthe forthcomingrman for maya

thanks,mike.

[davidbasalla]

thank you!
by querying I mean that I create a random U and V value (repeatedly in a for loop). For each iteration I get the corresponding X, Y and Z value according on the landscape/nurbs plane (using a pointOnSurface node).
Then i use 'fprint' to write these values into a text file (.rib - same thing) as in "Translate X Y Z". After that i call the tree model...
I hope this makes sense :)
The idea behind this is that i never actually create anything in Maya, cos otherwise it would just collapse...

[Buexe]

I really like the tree surface quality or however you may describe/call it. Please keep us updated!

[mthemelis]

is there a way to recreate this in mental ray?


perhaps make use of an instance geometry shader???
placeholder objects??

thanks,
mike

[sacslacker]

Thanks for the explanation DavidBasalla. I was using the wrong term when calling it instancing but you've confirmed the process for me. I'm definitely itching to play with Renderman now =)

The sad part is, my little studio is on a very limited budget so Renderman might be a year or two off =(

I knew that it was mostly text based but I always thought that there'd be a way to see the shaders and things like that in the scene. I guess that's what slim is for eh?

I have so much to learn I tell ya!

[davidbasalla]

hi,
here's another update. Ive pretty much finished with the project, its due this week.
Most of the project consisted of creating a sort of pipeline that included Maya, Mel and Prman.

Here are two renders for the final presentation.
The first one uses a PaintFX Tree for the foreground, the background is done with Renderman.
The second scene only contains Renderman trees, with a rock put in for good measure... that scene has around 80000 instances...
there are some animations on my website, feel free to check it out!
Cheers, Dave

http://www.stufftolookat.f2s.com/Dave/loneTreeShot.jpg


http://www.stufftolookat.f2s.com/Dave/landscape4.jpg

[Buexe]

wow, looking really great! I imagine that must have have been a LOT of work. THe only thing that jumps to my eye is the bump map on the left side, imho less would be more. Anyway, I really like the colors! :thumbsup:

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