Is Vue in decline?

#1

Hi guys.

My name is Andrew and I work in GarageFarm.NET’s team.

I started this thread because we have been supporting Vue for quite some time, and we are wondering if continuing the support makes sense.

We recently get very few Vue customers, and we need to cover the cost of licensing with payments which our customers make to render with us.

Is Vue getting less popular? Maybe there is a different software to which Vue users are moving? I’m very curious of your opinions.

I added a multichoice poll, if you have time to take it would help me to get the image of what is happening. The last Vue release has number R2, but I understand that it should be called 2018 or 2019.

  • I’m using Vue standalone
  • I’m using Vue plugin for 3ds Max
  • I’m using Vue plugin for Maya
  • I’m using Vue plugin for C4D
  • I’m using Vue plugin for Lightwave
  • I’m going to upgrade to Vue 2018\2019
  • I’m not going to upgrade to Vue 2018\2019
  • I’m using Vue 2016
  • I’m using Vue 2015
  • I’m using Vue older than 2015

0 voters

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#2

Vue died a long time ago. Developers screwed up a really good thing. I was in love w/that program years ago…then came very frustrated w/ it…then came total apathy.

#3

I think they aliened a large portion of users by changing their licensing to rental only, while many users prefer a perpetual license. These days, perpetual license+annual maintenance is acceptable to most, but not software that stops working if you drop off subscription.

The developers seem to be doing the right thing by the software: both Vue and Plant Factory are innovative – but their owners made a bad decision on licensing.

There are excellent products which compete or arguably exceed Vue in various aspects e.g. Terragen, and some excellent focused terrain generators. Then there’s the move away from CPU/off-line rendering, toward game engines. For those folks, licensing aside, what matters is what usable assets can be created and exported into said engine. It isn’t clear how focused e-on is on that segment…

#4

I’ve always found Vue to be buggy, unstable, and SLOW. It’s really cool and the concepts work, but even Xstream was weak compared to the programs it was meant to connect to.

Nowadays we just use Maya and SpeedTree. No real need for View, and Vray renders far faster and cleaner than Vue’s engine ever did.

#5

My experience with Vue is crash, crash, crash, crash. I bought Vue 4 a few decennia ago and after crash so many tossed it in the garbage bin. Years later I bought Vue 9.
5 versions later I expected it to be more stable and near crash free. But nope, it just crashed, crashed and crashed while still being unacceptable slow. I bought a Vue plugin for C4D and the otherwise so stable application started to crash, crash and crash.

I’ll never ever touch that crashtastic software again.

#6

Hi guys. Thank you for sharing your opinions and taking the poll.

We eventually decided to support Vue. Basically if there is a customer with a big enough project, we support it.

We had our share of problems with Vue, however it rather didn’t crash. Maybe because we are rendering from command line, no Frame Buffer.

When it comes to speed, that’s true, the rendering times are quite long. Also we noticed that they go up pretty fast with resolution increase, so just a test in lower resolution wasn’t enough to guess how long the higher res will render. Finally, we figured out to render a test of a vertical strip and calculate an estimate based on its rendering time. :slight_smile: