I rendered a scene in C4D and it took 24 seconds to render. The same scene in Vue takes about 2 hours.
I think Eon should allow Vue to be able to use external renderer’s like “Renderman” or “Final Render” for example. IMO the render time would be better and of better quality.
No I haven’t. Does XStream allow you to render your Vue scenes in C4D? I thought the Vue scene was still rendered in a Vue window within C4D.
xStream lets you render all elements (Vue+C4D) in the same window (pictures window), but Vue renders the Vue elements and Cinema renders the “native” elements, so there won’t be any improvement in the rendering time. There was a rumor about Maxwell being able to render vue scenes, but this was a few years ago, and no news since. But Maxwell render isn’t the fastest around either.
And the instantiation technique Vue uses for ecosystems may not be compatible with other renderers. This and the advanced lighting models Vue uses on infinite scenes may not translate to standard GI solutions.
bruno021,
Thanks. As a C4D user, I feel Vue’s weakest point is it’s renderer or lack of it. It’s frustrating to create beautiful scenes, only to find they take so many hours to render. Sometimes between 40-100 hours and more for 1 image.
Sure there’s great services like the “Ranch” render farm, but IMO, EON needs to really look at overhauling Vue’s renderer to increase it’s quality, speed and to include a multithread renderer something like C4D’s.
I would really like to be able to use a fast, high quality 3rd party renderer for my Vue scenes.
Lol, Paint Guy, Vue’s render engine is already multithreaded! You cantweak Vue’s render engine a lot by using your own render settings; If you’re not too familiar with Vue, of course it seems very slow, but once you get more into it, you can speed up the process greatly, sometimes you can cut render times by a factor of 2.
First thing you may not know ( sorry if you do), is to change the atmosphere quality to -1 when using advanced lighting models such as GR AO and GI. You won’t see any difference 99% of the time. But it will make a huge difference in render times.
Ouch! Surely you’re not optimizing your render and scene settings!
Check out Peggy Walters’ (no relation) PDF on the subject.
First of all let me make it clear I am not trying to knock Vue at all. I like Vue and use it most every day. I am just looking for options to speed up the rendering of my Vue images, whether this be within Vue or using an external third party renderer.
Bruno, you said:
“If you’re not too familiar with Vue, of course it seems very slow, but once you get more into it, you can speed up the process greatly”
Maybe I am not doing all I can do to speed up my render’s. I have been using Vue for 4 years and don’t claim to know it all, so I welcome your advice. I didn’t know I could change the atmosphere quality to -1. I will have to try this. Thanks
Now I use C4D and I must admit I like the way it handles it’s renders, both in way of quick speed and high quality. I also know C4D is more money and therefore I am not saying Vue’s renderer should be as fast or as high in quality. Call me crazy but I have seen a few artist’s in the renderosity forum’s mentioning render times for Vue in the 40-80 hour ballpark. I just think it would be nice to be able to have Vue improve it’s render engine so it can render it’s images faster and still with a higher quality or allow for the use of third party render engines.
chipp, you said:
“Ouch! Surely you’re not optimizing your render and scene settings!”
Yes, maybe I need to look at further improving my render settings.
That’s all.
Thanks
Out of curiosity - and without trying to knock C4D down. Are you comparing scenes regarding render speed with a similar amount of polygons and materials?
I always found for me, that those landscape creators like Vue or Bryce have a tendency that you create scenes with an enormous amount of polygons. Way more than you normally would do in programs like C4D, Maya, Max etc.
So it would be interesting to see how C4D for example deals with a 50 billion polygon scene.
Hi,
I knew the Pdf on the subject, it’s an ok overview but still puts all the choices back into your hat. I’ve been using Vue for a while and I have to agree - on complex scenes, or scenes with GI or GR or displacement(in vue6) at high rez, over 3200x rendertimes are huge. Even if you know to use the user settings, sometimes you need them high enough to let’s say get the grain out of the shadows…
The fact that you can render 70bilion poly still amazes me though:)
It seems the only way of figuring out the render settings for a particular scene is testing testing - and that means lots and lots of time. For animations, just get a few frames in there to see how bad is the grain flicker. For large stills… take a vacation:)
…what I can say, Vue didnt can handle large polycouts, it is one of the slowest engine I know, If I compare a scene in an other application, with millions of instanced polygons, they are much faster than Vue is…
Blanket statements without examples rarely carry much weight. Perhaps you can provide such an example? I, would be interested to see how fast Maxwell renders a similar outdoor scene with over 1 billion instanced polys with radiosity turned on.
I do know there are very fast renders out there, such as Fprime, which are almost magical in terms of speed. Perhaps Vue’s engine is slower than some when rendering standard numbers of polys in ordinary settings. But, I think the renderer is optimized for outdoor scenery, which requires a different kind of renderer.
… I said “one of the slowest I know”, not the slowest,
if you need examples with high polycounts… try to load objects with 1 million polygons, and Vue slows down,
And so does Lightwave, and so does Max, and so does just about any other 3D program I can think of. They all slow down when you add 1 million polygons. The issue is how much do they slow down? As I’m typing this, I’m trying to export a 980,000 + poly model from Lightwave…and it keeps hanging. So, I’ve resorted to exporting a 327,000 poly sphere as an OBJ. This still took a bit of time.
Now that I’ve got the sphere exported. I import it into Vue 5-Infinite and duplicate it twice. Vue5 does not create instances when duplicating, so now I have a very real 983,042 polys in my scene. I next use the ‘final’ render settings and render to screen at 640x480 which takes about 11 seconds on my laptop computer…which doesn’t seem too bad to me.
It may also depend on the complexity of the geometry. A 700,000 tree with 2000k textures on it renders faster in Maya software then in Vue… both at good quality.
On the other hand, perhaps only software like terragen2 may match Vue when it comes to instancing. You cant render 80 bilion poly in Maya with a normal computer, can you? For outdoor scenes that’s great. Vue has other drawbacks and bugs unfortunatelly…
Wabe, good points. It is hard to compare render speeds with certain scenes. For example I’ve not found a way to create instances in C4D like I can in Vue, so it is hard to compare the render times of a comparable scene in Vue and C4D. I don’t have XStream. Maybe this would make the test doable.
The types of images I need to render faster are: water, lights, godray’s, clouds etc. I’ve found Cinema 4D is exceedingly faster at rendering these types of images.
In Vue one needs to spend many hours experimenting and tweaking the render settings just to get water, godrays, etc. to render faster. In Cinema 4D I use the default render settings and the renders still come out faster and clearer. In my business I don’t have time to spend hours experimenting just to get a faster render time, I want to spend this time creating. I still think Vue is an excellent product, I just think there needs to be more emphasis made on improving the speed and quality of the render engine. These have been my observations and others may not agree.
I have done a few tests comparing C4D’s and Vue’s render speed. I will try to post some of these tests later, but I am very busy with work right now.
Thanks
Well, obviously Maxxon simply was better in putting some defaults together.
But maybe someone can be a good boy and save all the different settings you can find in Peggy Walters’ tutorial in Vue render settings that all that need them then can simply load. Instead of going through the pdf again and again.
Of course, whenever you found a good setting yourself, you can save it for later use too - saves time on the long run as well.
PS: Just to correct a upcoming wrong impression. I have no problem when other programs can render things faster. Rendering is only one chapter in the story, more important in my eyes are features that allow me to do the things I want to, I need to do.
Render power is always something that can be bought when needed, features is a little more tricky because it as well has to do with experience.
Well i use xStream as well but with Maya. And i will admit Maya most of the time is too slow for me and i find Vue to render much faster. As for optimizations, well there could be some improvement on the new render engine still but let us compare to lets say Bryce. Yeah probably not a great comparison but it is still the same “genre” of package but yet Bryce is very slow and certainly would not handle even half of what Vue can. And i did try Terragen 2 as well and find that much slower then Vue as well. Cinema’s renderer is fast but hey maybe when Vue gets to release 10 then we shall see 
TG2? Hmmm… maybe in 10 years, they’ll have a user friendly interface and a renderer that works in decent times. Vue is slow? try TG2!
Paint Guy, I didn’t know you’re already a Vue “veteran”, so excuse me if I sounded like a teacher!
But do check Peggy’s pdf about render times, and if it doesn’t give the link to the “instant render” button some seem to want, you may learn how to get better render times out of Vue.