One week with Vue Infinite 7.5 findings

#1

This is my first post here, and I figured it would be very boring to introduce myself (after all, who cares?), so I decided to contribute something useful. At least that’s what I hope.

So far I didn’t find much information about the 7.5 version of Vue, so I thought I post my findings here.

Maybe it’s helpful for someone…

 [u]1: my needs[/u]
 
 I needed a software to render photo-realistic landscapes AND other objects for commercial use, running on a Windows PC. My first choice was Terragen2 (with the xFrogs plant package), the demo showed results slightly better than the Vue Infinite demo, and the Terragan+xFrogs plant package is a steal.
 However, I need additional objects in my landscape, and the import and handling of those into Terragen simply sucks, so I kept on testing Vue and liked the workflow.
 
 [u]2: what I like[/u]
 
 - Ease of use. Vue Infinite 7.5 has a nice workflow (or, to be more precise, a workflow that seems to suit my weird brain quite well. Your mileage may vary...).
 
 - the results: no matter what objects I throw into Vue, the rendered results were impresive. Of course there are programs that can do single tasks a little better (e.g. Terragen for landscapes, Poser for human bodies, etc...), but the overall results are very good. And the result/time ratio is VERY good!
 
 - it runs on my system (Core2 Duo @ 4 GHz, 4 GB RAM) fast and stable, no single crash in one week of extensive usage.
 
 - network rendering: it's nice to spread the rendering load to additional machines (it's called RenderCow with Vue, and it's included in the Infinite-package), and you don't need a 64 bit OS to render large images when 4 GB RAM would not be enough. I even could run a RenderCow on a Linux system using the Wine Windows emulator. Nice!

2: what I do NOT like

  • multiple screen support: I use 2 nice 24" wide screens, but I can’t place things the way I would like. And Vue simply forgets the screen placement (when it’s stretched over 2 screens) after a restart.

[u]3: errors and problems

[/u]- sometimes (often after a manual zoom) you can’t move selected objects anymore. Sometimes zooming again helps, but often you have to save and restart the application.

  • sometimes one of the RenderCow network renderers is reported as ‘Disconnected’ even when it’s running nicely. You have to stop, exit and relaunch the RenderCow on that computer.

4: my conclusion

Overall, I’m quite happy with Vue 7.5 Infinite, it’s well worth the money and will save me a ton of time. Like every other software of that genre it needs a decent computer to run well, but I already had a couple of those before I purchased it, and I didn’t have to change or tune them to cooperate with Vue. I’d recommend Vue to everyone who needs to do similar tasks.

Cheers,
Tom

#2

yeah the lack of proper multi screen is a bummer, but hopefully vue 8 and 8.5 will improve upon that.

#3

good report, am working on some stuff also so will mostl ikely post my comments and a couple of pics. im runninb windos on a mac pro with 8gigs of ram so its nice to hear you had no problems. how were your render times? and what size were you rendering? some pics of your work wolud be a bonus to judge level of complexity detail etc, etc.

#4

I’m still testing everything to get a better understanding of Vue, so there’s not (yet) any results worth posting here.
My test renders had from 300.000 up to 11.000.000 polygons, but the rendering speed depends more on the scene itself (clouds, fog, water, reflection, etc.) than the number of polygons.

I normally render at 3600x2700 (with 4000x3000 one of my RenderCows crashes sometimes, but 3600x2700 works very reliable) and, depending on the scene, get render times from 4 - 15 h with the highest render quality preset on a single PC. Right now I start to customize my own user preset to get better quality and less render time.

The nice thing I can report is that the render times scale very good with the size and number of RenderCows, so with 3 PCs you’ll need about 1/3 of the time.

Cheers,
Tom

#5

cool im only running on one machine but i took a look at the ground up book over the weekend and it had some good tips for saving rendering time. any tips from anyone would be welcome! it mentioned unchecking a few boxes in the render dialogue here and there and playing with a few settings, and of course not rendering to screen but rendering to disk… cant remember off hand!

#6

Yhread on that over on Renderosity :slight_smile:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2777372

As an alternate to what I posted there, you can instead try those settings, but:
Turn optimize volumetrics OFF
turn Anti-ALiasing Options “Systematic” to Optimized and turn up subrays to 16 and 36 with texture filtering 36%

#7

cheers man,
i love all this turning things off and putting things to percentages!

Ive been hearing bad things about vue but you NEED to know what to do with a software to get it to work for you… If only i didnt have to sleep…

its not so much cutting corners, but more turning into them nicely?

www.chrisdebney.com

#8

I’m glad you’re having a good experience with 7.5. My experience with everything up to 7.2 has not been so good.

My test renders had from 300.000 up to 11.000.000 polygons

…and that explains why you’re having such a good experience. 11 million polys is a starting point for my Vue scenes, which generally range in the billions (25-50 billion or more) polys. Which of course brings Vue to its knees, even on a very powerful workstation, despite the fact that is should work properly at that level, and is advertised to do so. Does 7.5 work better with highly detailed scenes?

Also, regarding the importing of non-native geometry, what kinds of programs are you using to create the objects? I’ve found the exact opposite with Vue (again, up to 7.2) but if 7.5 is more stable using high-poly objects (1 million polys would be a starting point for me, exporting from Mudbox to Maya to Vue) then perhaps they finally got it right.

I don’t mean to be a naysayer, and as long as you and your clients are satisfied with the results then all is well. But maybe you should give a scene a good push and see how 7.5 handles a decent amount of geometry/ecosystem instances? 11 million is a fairly small scene…

Disclaimer: I’ve been using Xstream in standalone mode (Maya integration doesn’t work)… perhaps Infinite is a better choice and that’s why yours is so much more stable for you? Any thoughts on this?

#9

It should be easy to use the eco-painter to add zillions of polygons for testing, so when I’d find some spare time next weekend I can do some bigger scenes to see how Vue behaves.

Disclaimer: I’ve been using Xstream in standalone mode (Maya integration doesn’t work)… perhaps Infinite is a better choice and that’s why yours is so much more stable for you? Any thoughts on this?

From what I’ve heart/read so far most of the problems seem indeed related to the integration of xStream into other applications/workflows, so I guess that’s where e-on has to put more work in the future, especially because that’s were the big fish are swimming.

Tom

#10

Hm? not sure which way to take that, lol.
need me to post screenshots and tips? :slight_smile:

#11

twas the ramblings of an animator doing another allnighter!

but yeah the more tips the better

#12

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