Lightwave users: Are you happy w/V5i?...

[WillBellJr]

Wow, well this says a lot (I think! :shrug: )

What? No LW users here or you Vue5i users here just not using it with your Lightwave package??...

-Will

[thx1138]

I'm in the process of using it. But to get the results I want, I guess I still need to get the hang of it more. I'm considering getting the AsileFX DVD's. The online help just doesn't do it for me. The node based surfacing is so different from LW.

As for integration with LW. I just do basic composting. Foreground objects rendered in LW and backgrounds in Vue. The sync between the both is about all you need for that and that seems to work. Haven't used Z buffer or anything.

Stability is an issue. Network rendering crashed way too often. It's also slow in some cases. For now, I can live with these issues.
I didn't get the LW+Vue bundle just for Vue. The free-upgrade to LW9 is equally important, perhaps even more.

[mdunakin]

Yeah, sorry for not replying sooner, WillBellJr, I've just been a bit busy.
Personally, I would tell you, if that offer to get the bundle is still available, then I would go for it.

I know about the Vue4 and other versions, and can say that the Eco System alone in Vue5I
is worth every penny, even when I paid for the full price version, though I also bought
the LW/Vue bundle and then sold off my full priced version to another person.
But also, LW9 alone will be worth every penny just for 9!
But if you can get the bundle, then do it!

Yes, there ARE some issues with some things and integration, but I expect a lot of these
things to get worked out over time, especially since they (e-on/NewTek) are both teaming up.

But, like has been mentioned here, I too had some troubles with importing textured
LW objects into Vue, but only a little and also, I had and still have, no clue what
I'm really doing as far as importing/exporting objects and such, since I've
mostly been spending all my time in Vue just trying to learn it :)

I know the time will come though when I'll really HAVE to learn how to import and all that,
but really, I'm more like thx1138, since I mostly will be doing compositing work and
the Synchro plugin works like a charm, at least it has so far for me.

Have you checked out my latest scenes I've made with a LW object that I then
textured in Vue, not because I nessisarily needed to texture it in Vue, as I think the
first import looked OK, though now I really can't remember how it looked, but because
I wanted to "learn" how to texture an object in Vue and now I can say that I think I
can texture ANY object I bring into Vue with no problems, if I felt like doing that.
And yes, there IS a bit of a learning curve there for texturing in Vue and it took me
some time to find some of the things that we all know and use so many times in LW in
the Surface Editor, like it took me a while to figure out how to do something as simple
as Rotate a procedural Texture, but once I found it, things went easy after that.
But like I say, I did this for the sole purpose of learning how to texture an object in Vue.

But!, I can see how if you wanted just load up an already textured object that you made
in LW, and it doesn't import as you want so it still looks the same, how that can be very
anoying, and why I still need to learn about those things in that area of Vue and LW.

I sort of think, it may be better to save out your objects from LW first, as some other
format that Vue likes better, like maybe, .3ds or something else? Someone else who knows
more about this may have better answers for you on this subject, since I'm still brand new at it?

I "am" planning on getting out a few basic texturing tutorials pretty soon for Vue.
If that helps any? :)
I just want to share what I've learned and figured out so far for others to enjoy.

Anyway, you can check out my renderings in a thread I'm about to post of from the
work I've been doing on my Desert Trestle Wash scene, which you can follow the stages
I took with that, under the "crummy test" thread, untill I get the other thread posted up.
That is, if you haven't already been following all that? :)

But, my point is, that I would totally say YES to
getting that LW/Vue5I bundle while the gettin is good!
Either way, you'd be a happy camper, with just LW9 alone would
make it worth the while, but the added Vue5I just makes it that much better.

I know I'm the happy camper with Vue and Lw :)

Anyway, maybe some others can throw in some opinions?

............................................md :)

.

[krimpr]

I'll chirp in here in agreeance with thx1138 and mdunakin. While it is unquestionably possible to create superb landscape scenes with Lightwave only, (I've seen masterful pieces as I know we all have) Vue allows you to create landscapes quickly. I just got a copy a while ago and have not delved deeply into it yet but am looking forward to taking advantage of the features geared toward animated scenes soon. For me, the incentive to really get motivated with it will be the release of the XFusion plugin, which will allow Vue scnes to be rendered from within LW and provide access to all of the tools and options that LW affords. I think that the combination will be awesome, and since it is free with a LW9 upgrade I think it's one of the best CG deals available.

[PentamiterBeast]

Krimpy... Baby....

How can you possibly consider the Vue/Lw9 combo, the price is less than Vue bought on its own.

But from what Ive seen, there's not a huge amount you can do with it until the fables Fusion comes along. All you can seem to sync is the animation of things with any ease, not light intesities or so on, however I have found some neat work arounds for matching up the two in the meantime.

For instance, if you want to have a character rendered In LW with the BG rendered in Vue, you can set the Vue camera to be 360 panorama, render out as an HDR of your Vue scene. Load that into HDRshop, and get the Lightgen Plugin for HDRshop. Export a Lightgen file from the HDR image, open LW and use the built in Lightgen2LW plug, this'll give you a light array that matches exactly the VUE scene and still renders well quick.

If you wanted to get an object you have built and textured up in LW into Vue somehow, simply create a new "vue use" copy, crunch all the geometry down to the one layer. Create a new UVmap in Atlas mode. In layout go through your surfaces, and set all your bump texture layers to replace all the colour texture layers, and do a surface bake to this Atlas texture, do the same for any other channels, as well as of course a surface bake for just the original colour texture itself, just make sure to remove any gradients that are incidence, or time, or proximity based. And make sure you do it floodlit (100% ambient, no other light).

You'll now have a model with 1 UV map that covers the whole model, and a bunch of textures for bump, spec, colour, etc, that use that map, and contain the combination of all painted textures, procedurals, non-angle based gradients, and so on.

Adding these textures to the model once imported into Vue is easy, if you were usng any angle based functions in the LW texture stack, in whatever channels, you can just recreate them again in VUE.

A lil bit of work, but easy enough to get exactly what you had in LW replicated in Vue.

Also if you're wanting to get trees out of Vue and into LW, also remember to remove the transparency textures from the LW exported tree objects, and instead in Layout be sure to add the transparency texture into the clip map for each tree object. It'll render a LOT faster.

Anyhow, thats it, hope I've helped some. Sorry if any of this seems a little confusing, its probably me, Im not really myself at the moment

[WillBellJr]

Hi guys, thanks for the conversations - I'm still considering the upgrade because I'm familiar with Vue (4) - I know that Vue is sorta slow, and can be a little soft stability-wise.

I want to be able to do more than just render out an animated camera background plate to use in Lightwave...

If I can't easily (within reason) import properly textured LW objects into Vue, there's not that much incentive for me.

Granted, the upgrade price is really worth it and I'll prolly do it simply because it's a steal but I don't want to (yet again) buy another package that I don't get much use out of due to some unresolved import limitations or crash bugs etc.

Now the XFusion "promise" does seem to make it really worth while but again, it's not here yet and that will have to go down its own path of updates and fixes until its potential is fully realized.

Unfortunately these days when you buy software, you're buying into a development cycle - rarely do you ever get >everything< that's initially promised without waiting for patches and upgrades...

Vue by itself is a wonderful package but it's not an island (whoop) unto itself - I need the promised integration with other packages (for me LW and XSI).

-Will

[krimpr]

Penta! I thought you'd never get here. Figures you'd have the Vue/Lw connection worked out already; somehow I'm not surprised. My blank stare intensified when you mentioned "Atlas UV's'. It's statements like that that keep me holding my breath for XFusion. Any time I try to UV, particularily Atlas, it looks like a bad car accident. WillBelljr: I hear your concern over undertested/incomplete/underdeveloped software releases. I read somewhere that the Maya XFusion in beta was an awesome plugin, although probably it was from E-On PR. If it does what it is supposed to, I think that the LW/Vue combo will rock. I agree that VInfinite at this point is somewhat of an island but I'm hopeful that XFusion will be a good bridge. I'm optomistic, maybe to a fault. We'll find out soon; release is supposedly early in Q1. In the meantime I guess I'll sit on the curb as PentamiterBeastmete runs away with the ball. Again.

[PentamiterBeast]

Yeah, atlas does have a flavour of the Picasso to it doesn't it. Normally I avoid it too, but if you're using surface baker its fine, cos LW is drawing the texture onto the UVmap for you. I guess its just cos lightwave knows what Lightwave does.

[krimpr]

Hey- wait a minute. I think I follow you now Pent. Thanks for waking me up!

[enochian]

I would have to say that getting the LW9 upgrade and Vue5I is the best investment I have made. I can't wait to get my hands on LW9.

[mduclon]

For instance, if you want to have a character rendered In LW with the BG rendered in Vue, you can set the Vue camera to be 360 panorama, render out as an HDR of your Vue scene. Load that into HDRshop, and get the Lightgen Plugin for HDRshop. Export a Lightgen file from the HDR image, open LW and use the built in Lightgen2LW plug, this'll give you a light array that matches exactly the VUE scene and still renders well quick.



I'm trying this, I get 5 files from VUE when I render as an HDR, which do I use?

[PentamiterBeast]

You should realy only get the one, though I must confess, I havent actually done it as render to a save location, I've simply done renders to screen, then saved the image, choosing HDR as the format.

[Shaun_michael]

For instance, if you want to have a character rendered In LW with the BG rendered in Vue, you can set the Vue camera to be 360 panorama, render out as an HDR of your Vue scene. Load that into HDRshop, and get the Lightgen Plugin for HDRshop. Export a Lightgen file from the HDR image, open LW and use the built in Lightgen2LW plug, this'll give you a light array that matches exactly the VUE scene and still renders well quick.


Hi,

Just trying this method out but not really having any joy. I read on the HDR Shop site in the Lightgen blurb that it generates an error. I get an error message and then the lightgen plug in HDR shop just hangs. Am I quitting out too early? Should I be more patient or am I doing something fundamentally wrong. I leave all vlues in the lgihtgen plug to default and ensure I choose the "text" output.

Do you have any advice please?

Thanks in advance,

Shaun

[Shaun_michael]

No wories, sorted!


EDIT: No I lied, not sorted at all. Sometimes its writing a file to disk, which I can open in wordpad and save as a text file, but not always.

Do I assume that I need to scale the lightsources within the lightgen plug to drop the intensities down from the 7000-8000 range that LW sets them at?

Hmmm - still trying.

Shaun

[PentamiterBeast]

Yeah you do have to set a scale in the LG plugin, and yes you do have to ewait a few moments for the plugin to complete the .txt file. Good news is you only need small images to generate Lightgens. in HDR shop you can scale your HDR image using the scale tools, a size of 128X256 is fine, and the LG plug only takes about 1 min to run. Remember that the HDR image has to be in latitude/longitude mode for te plug to work properly (as it is once saveed from Vue). though you can als use the panoramic transformations tool to turn it into an angular map (lightprobe) for use as an image world probe for reflections in LW too.

Keep playing with LightGen, you'll get it, it took me a bit of arsing around to begin with too. (still does on occasion).

[Shaun_michael]

Thats great, thanks.

Arsing about, lol. You sound english!

I will mess about with it some more. There are one or two other things I might ask if you have the time to answer.

1) I tick the scale button, but what value would you suggest for "desired total light intensity"?

2) How many lights would you suggest generating to ensure an accurate representation of the Vue scene?

Many of my lights were running at somewhere in the region of 5-6% after using the scale function, is this right?

Thanks for your time, and for your help.

Cheers,

Shaun

[DonAVP]

Can Vue import or deal with SDTS files like LW? I have projects that need real world locations not make-believe. I know I can deform a mesh in LW and should be able to bring it into Vue just wanted to know if anyone has done this and if there were any pitfalls. I am a complete novice with Vue. Downloaded the demo and will install to play today.

Thanks
Don

[Shaun_michael]

OK, so far this is what I've done, and seem to have some nice results...

As you advised I changed the size of the image to 256x128. This considerably sped up the lightgen process. I also changed the Vue render to a lightprobe image for reflections in image world.

I told it to generate 10 lights with a total intensity of 1. This generated lights in the 40-50% intensity range.

Once in layout, I ran the lightgen plug, and told it not to affect specularity, affect OGL, and all the lights were to be distant lights at 100% and 100m distance.

Added the lightprobe I created in HDR Shop for reflections. Looks quite nice for very basic, un-tinkered settings. Would it be worth changing the lights to area lights or would I take a huge render hit? Also, somewhere I need a key light (a sun), so I'll see where the best place for that is in the lights that were genrated by looking at the image.

Oh, one other questions, more LW related than Vue, but once the lightgen has done it's stuff, can I save my scene and then load that lighting set-up into an already made scene?

Looks pretty good so far, but now to render something out of LW, and comp it with the background rendered in Vue...

Cheers,

Shaun

PS- not looked into all details of this light set-up, such as shadows yet, so still work to do. If anyone else has tried this, I'd appreciate your advice greatly.

[PentamiterBeast]

I find I need to play with a couple of different settings in the scale in LG to get things right on each individual scene, so how I tend to go about it is this. Seclect scale light intensity, set the number 3. I also use about 20 lights.

In LW, I usually make the lights specularly effective )though it doesn't matter, as you can bulk select the lights, and changing the master properties of 1 [type, spec/oGL on/off, etc] changes it for all, so it makes no odds what settings you use in these respects on import. Though I usually make them shadow mapped spots, cos thats how I tend to use them throughout, area lights are a bit ambitious.

have an object ready, and render it. If it comes out a bit dark, delete the lights null, and all the lights, run the import on the same file again, change the intensity up to 150%-200%, and do this a couple of times till you're happy.

Your sun Keylight, well, if you have visible sun in the Vue render, this will come out in the HDR. Once your light rig is set up, just cycle through, and look for the brightest light, and robert's your father's brother. Set that 1 to be area, or distant, and play with its individual intensity as required.

As for can you load it into another scene, sure. Save it, load a new scene, choose load items from scene, click yes to import lights.

[Shaun_michael]

Thanks PentamiterBeast, you're a star!

... and strangely enough, Bob is my uncle!

[DonAVP]

Oh, one other questions, more LW related than Vue, but once the lightgen has done it's stuff, can I save my scene and then load that lighting set-up into an already made scene?

Yes you can in LW. Open the scene you want to load into. Select "Load Items from Scene" when it asks to "Load lights from scene as well as objects?" click "Yes". Be adviced any objects, bones and nulls will also loaded but not the camera/s. This is how a lot of people create different light rigs and load them into other scenes without doing all of the setup agian. There are a ton of uses for this trick.

On my question about SDTS files do you know anything?

Don

[Shaun_michael]

I'm afraid I cant help you there Don. I would suggest running a new thread on it and seeing if any of the other Vue users can help you out.


Good luck, and thanks for your help.

Shaun

[BazC]

My two penny worth...If you're upgrading Lightwave this deal is ludicrously good value in fact I bought a secondhand copy of LW6 and upgraded on the strength of this offer (and the coming LW9!).

I'm pretty new to both apps so I haven't done much more than play with them but the potential is HUGE! The most serious work I've used Vue for is creating HDRIs for using in LW for image based illumination (with help from PentamiterBeast - thanks mate!) and I've been REALLY pleased with the results. The dynamic range isn't that high so the lighting tends to be a bit even but add a ground object to block the light from below and add an area light for directional light and instant sunshine!

Yes I've had a few crashes with Vue but then I've had a few with Lightwave aswell!
Speedwise it does seem a little slow but you have to consider what your asking it to do. Load up a multi million poly scene and add a volumetric atmosphere and you will be looking at enormous render times but optimise the scene a bit, adjust anti aliasing etc and you can reduce render times considerably. I'm sure once you really understand Vue's setting you can get it down to quite acceptable times. Whack all your setting up to maximum in Lightwave and you'll get some pretty scary render times too!

Yep, I think it's a GREAT deal and I'm sure I'll be using it a lot in the future. I wonder what sort of upgrade deal we'll get on Vue6 though and how much is fusion going to be? - Baz

[dueyftw]

My 2 cents. Find something else that works. There are a lot of people that bought 5I only to find that is doesn't work. The batch doesn't work, rendering farm doesn't work. and then all oom issues. Get the upgrade for lightwave and sell Vue 5I on ebay with the clause that the program may crash all the time.

Dale

[PentamiterBeast]

I still maintain that Vue's pretty decent, I get very few problems with it, and it hasn't crashed on me once. I think some of you users need to sort your computers out

[mdunakin]

Vue's been kicking a** for me!
I've been loving it.
Yes, I'm not going to pretend that there aren't issues,
cuz there are, but for most things, it's premo.

..........md :)

.

[enochian]

I haven't had to many issue with vue. network rendering works great for me I havn't tried batch rendering yet, and it has not crashed once on me. By biggest complent is the camera and that there is no perspective view.

[mdunakin]

Yeah, I'm BEGGING them to add a Perspective view.
This is sooooooooooo needed, I can't see how they managed to not even have it already in there!?

Hopefully, they'll add it in the future, and the very soon future?!

....................md :)

.

[dueyftw]

Anyone thinking using Vue professionally should rethink it. Vue own forum as way too many people and companies wondering why it doesn't work.

Dale

[PentamiterBeast]

Poor workmen, tools, blame, yadda, yadda. Yeah, perspective view, that WOULD be nice.

[Bliz]

I agree.

I've only played with it for a few hours but I'm loving it so far. Even if I could only create static background plates and textures I'd think the LW9 bundle was a great deal but V5i seems stable on my Athlon64 system so far and all the basic functions seem great.

And you get all those great demo scenes e-on use in the marketing, included on the extras CD to pick apart to your hearts content.

Looking forward to using this on some 'professional' projects soon.

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