Amazing work! Any scene files?

#1

I’m a Vue newbie, but a practiced modeler and compositor. I’m amaaazed at how realistic these scenes are. Are there any threads around where somebody released the .vue file (under creative commons or non-commercial or something) for beginners like me to discover how they do it?

I’d like to take one of these photorealistic scenes and start to pull it apart. See what makes it look so good. For instance, if I remove the atmosphere, what does that do? If I remove the volumetric clouds, what does that do?

I’m also curious how much of the scene is right out of vue and how much is after tough up in photoshop or AE.

Thanks!

#2

Most of the matte painters don’t use Vue and the vast majority of work you see here don’t have Vue elements in them. It’s just lots of painting, photowork and 3D assets.

And those who use Vue use it mainly as a base for doing lot of work on top of the renders. Because the truth is, unless you spend a lot of time tweaking shaders, ecosystems, terrains and render settings, the result looks like, well, like it was made with Vue. But it’s an usable tool for roughing up your scenes and get a general sense of lighting and layout before working out the details.

The point I am trying to make is that you probably wouldn’t learn anything by looking at a matte painter’s Vue scenes. They’re usually very primitive, out-of-the-box scenes and not that pretty to look at. Just basic renders. And sometimes not even that, with grain, lacking materials, full of holes and errors, but it’s okay as it’ll only serve as a base and the painter knows he’ll cover it up anyway.

#3

Oooh, very interesting. Maybe matte painting isn’t exactly what I want.

I need to create a variety of terrain flyovers, mostly for establishing shots, and set extensions. Does that just mean I will have to spend gobs of time to get something looking reasonable? Or perhaps since they’re moving, motion blur and elements in the foreground will save me?

When people say they used Vue in Terminator 4 for shots like this:
http://mirror-eu.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/spotlights/terminator_4/images/T4_1.jpg
Maybe Vue was used for the majority of that shot, with some photograph elements and a fair bit of post touch up?

#4

Well, matte painting these days doesn’t just mean static 2D paintings. I suggest looking into camera projections to get an idea how moving shots are usually created. For example, like this shot from The Ring:

http://home.comcast.net/~chrisstoski/ring_01.html

That Terminator shot looks like a pretty standard matte painting to me. They probably roughly laid out the scene in Vue and rendered a few frames to get quickly the basic correct lighting and perspective (which can be sometimes a bit tricky for really wide panoramic shots), stitched the shot together, made the actual painting and then created that camera move in 2D and/or with projections. And I’m sure a lot of work went to the comping and grading side of the process as well, especially as the film had that unique bleach bypass look.

Vue can be an useful tool in a painter’s toolbox, but it isn’t a magical software that spits out film quality shots with a few button presses, despite how hard e-on wants its potential customers to think so. The vast majority of the results - including on that Terminator shot - comes only after the renders. With lots and lots of work.

#5

Wow, thanks for opening my eyes. I’ve now changed my perspective completely. I think the right answer for what I need now is to use Vue to construct the landscape and foliage and add in layers of stills and video to add realism in 3dsmax/AE, and do some heavy post processing in AE and photoshop.

#6

Photorealism out of a box doesnt exist at the moment. Vue comes close if you know how to use it very well, but most Vue artists find that while they can produce great stills, as soon as they want to move the camera, it all falls apart. Stupidly slow render times, flickering geometry and massive grain make it all but useless for high quality shots.
However, as Wizdoc says, with the correct matte painting toolset and skills to accompany it, you can use a Vue scene to rough out a shot that you intend to cover and repaint and get great results.
Vue has a place, but its an imperfect tool at the moment. Maybe in a few years it will be a bit more of a wonder-package, but that would ruin all the fun! :wink:

As for taking gobs of time, if you want good results, you will need to spend time getting them. You only get out what you put in.

Nick

#7

Right. When I first saw Vue, it was well advertised as that magic solution (good marketing team, I suppose).

I think I’m going to spend some time beefing up my digital painting skills with AE and photoshop.

Incidentally, is there a way to place a (3ds max term) dummy object in a Vue scene? How do people usually insert stills and moving assets with 3ds max and AE? I can’t find any obvious reference to ways of exporting dummy position/rotation/scale information.

#8

Yeh, e-on like to market a little beyond themselves… they take credit for a lot of work in films such as Terminator Salvation, Pirates etc … but the reality is, and i know from professional experience, that vue, at best, only gets you about 60% of the way. You then have to start working in photographic elements to bring it up to an acceptable level.

And when it comes to animation, forget it, vue still struggles to hold up.

On a personal note it really does piss me off how they take a shot from a film and pretty much tag vue with the credit. The reality is most of the shots that Vue takes credit for, in most cases you can barely see anything left of vue.

E-on has a great marketing team but the product itself has a long way to go. It never really lives up to the hype, the sculpting tools are still very basic and pretty useless, the render times are way too long, a number of issues still exist with rendering, you can’t get under the hud and make it work for a production environment and when it comes to e-on themselves, they’re very selective about who they want to help.

It has potential if they start listening to professional users, but for the moment it really does struggle to depart from the Bryce crowd.

Dave.

#9

Thanks for all the professional-point-of-view advice. It’s exactly what I needed.

From the (meager) compositing work I’ve done, the one thing that hits home every time is that putting something real with something rendered usually helps fool the eye. If I’m doing particle smoke, I throw in layers of actual smoke to give the proper subtle motion. I suppose this is exactly true with Vue too.

So, my next $10000 question is, how do people insert alpha planes into their scene? I’d MUCH prefer to do it in After Effects so I can avoid a major re-rendering if necessary.

They way I do it in 3ds max is with toys like Max2AE to export position, but I don’t know of a Vue equivalent.

#10

check out Andy Kramer at Video Copilot in answer to your question.

There is also a video called Thunderbirds? google it and you will see the power of vue.

As for Vue it isnt random enough and the results do not look organic enough for me as a matte painter.

Rich

#11

I haven’t seen Andrew Kramer do any Vue bits. I use After Effects quite a bit (all thanks to Andrew Kramer, btw! damn good site), but what I’m missing is the ability to have Vue tell me the position of an object so I can have After Effects put something there automatically (rather than having to eyeball and get it wrong).

#12

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