Xstream nightmare

#61

Hello everybody!
Hello Vincent!

Thanks for the nice and kind words :slight_smile: you are really nice and enthusiastic guy, willing to help community :thumbsup:

You said it doesnā€™t take too long to tweak Vue, so I propose little chalange, if you would like.

Some time ago I did architecture visualisation in Max, rendered in Vray, and added some trees etc in Photoshop. If you like you can send me your email address via my PM and I will email you 3ds max file, so you can export to Vue and do your own thing to make it nice, and, when you are happy, you can render, bit bigger, say 800x600 and post here. I will than send what I have done:) I am, as usual not happy what I have done :scream: but lets seeā€¦

Regards
Srdjan

#62

Vincent:

Is there a way to get an animated camera from max into vue without xstream? I am just starting with vue.

#63

Srdjan, will consider your challenge when I am finished with this project, quite busy with animating this project and doing its interior design.

Davey1:

I donā€™t have or use xtream. Read this thread from page 3, it details the process to sync max and vue.
In a nutshell:

  1. Install the MAX synchro plug ins found in your Vue5 CD.

  2. set up lights and animate your camera, say 150 frames long.

3)In Max, press f10 to bring out your render options.

Under Common menu, you MUST click RANGE and set it to whatever you need, this case 0-150

You MUST CLOSE the Dialog window.

  1. Under utilities, select ā€˜moreā€™ and the vue synchro. Select all the lights and camera and press synchronise. A message will pop up to say successful synchronisation.

Pasted from my earlier thread:

a) Synchronisation successful message should appear.
b) Make sure your building axis thingy is at y-axis zero or your model will appear above or below vueā€™s horizon line. Export your building to 3ds format
c) launch Vue and accept synchro data.
d) import your 3ds model with the resize and center option set to OFF. At this point you will probably see nothing.
e) Select Vue main camera
f) At the top right hand Main camera menu, select Motion rollout to synchronised. Scale of sync will appear as 10.0. Set it to 1.0 and click the sync camera again in the top right hand menu
g) Your building will snap into view, perfectly synced with Max camera view.
h) Create your terrain around the building, it doesnā€™t matter if trees grow in front of it, the masks later will separate the ecotrees. When you select your ecosystem material, do not auto populate the ecosystem as the terrain will be very, very huge due to importing objects into Vue at Maxā€™s units.
i) Select edit ecomaterial and go to root material, scale UP all plants, rocks, etc by at least a factor of 10. This will enable Vue to populate the terrain witthout self destructing (Edit: For me it was very slow and I tired of waiting). The scale will be about right visually plus minus twenty feet or so for tree heights. You have to experiment here.
j) Select render options and set quality to final and above. Select multipass and LEARN how to render out the alpha channels and SAVE as a MULTIPASS PSD format.
k) What you want for arch viz. are the object masks, layer masks and shadow masks. In twenty words or less, these masks allow you to separate trees that are in front of your building and separate your building from the ecosystem. (Edit: I lied, itā€™s 21 words)
l) Render the scene in vue. If its 800 x 600 pixels here, use same for max.
m) Render your building in Max with alpha channel. If its 800 x 600 pixels here, use same for VUE. (because the camera are perfectly synced, remember?)
n) Bring both renders into PSHOP and figure out the masks and separate the elements. Replace the building from Vue (because of the masks, you were able to separate the Vue building into its own layer) with your building from Max
o) Composited happiness.

If you ahve a max sunlight, the sycnchro process is the same, follow step f and g above and your vue sun will snap into position. Select a vue atmosphere and take it from there.

#64

Thanks Vincent!

It worked, though it is quite buggy.

#65

Hi Davey,

More tips:

If you are replacing the building with Max version, put the 3ds models in Vue on their OWN layer (name it say, ā€œ3ds_modelsā€) without any other geometry. Then you just need to output the layer named ā€œ3ds_modelsā€ and the shadow mask. This way you need to handle only one mask and one shadow layer.

If you are animating, output to sequence files and the compositing programme will handle the alpha channels flawlessly.

I tend to model my terrain in Max and export the terrain to Vue; this way, my terrain is always perfectly matched to the boundaries of my building. You can also split your terrain into blocks or shapes where different ecosystems will grow from.
This way, you are pretty much in control of what and where plants and trees and ecosystems will grow.

AND MY LAST ā€˜FREEā€™ TRADE SECRET:
If you model the flat geometry along, say, the terraces of your building or any place where you want plants to grow; could be even pots along the pedestrian walkways INSIDE MAX, you just export these surfaces to its own layer in VUE and apply the ecosystem material, render the mask and you control what grows and peeks out of wherever you want in your Max building. Because these are all modelled and placed in Max, you will never work blind.

Donā€™t know why, but I donā€™t find Vue5 Inf buggy. Could be Iā€™m using the very stable P4 3.2Ghz chip with original Intel motherboard and 3ds program certified ATI graphics card.

#66

Hi Vincent

Thanks again. I was wondering if you knew of a way to render the layer id pass with the G buffer so that it is anti-aliased. Right now it is not and I cant figure it out.

I am trying to isolate my trees as a render pass separate from the imported max geometry. I want the base of the trees to be occluded by the max geometry. Does that make sense?

EDIT: OOPS nevermind. I realized I am supposed to render a layer mask not a layer id!

Thanks,
Davey

#67

In reference to what Vincent mentioned earlier;

How do you go about synchronizing a camera in max, and bringing that information into Vue?

#68

Yes, Vue has render passes for the following:

Post Processing
Atmosphere Gain
Atmosphere Filter
Indirect Lighting
Background
Reflections
Refractions
Ambient
Shadows
Specular
Diffuse

#69

vue now has an update, it fix some (expected) bugs , if u bought it u have the rigt to get the updates :thumbsup: request for them to e-on :shrug:

#70

Hi piper1234,

it is not a bug, but underdeveloped software. I already forgot about Vue, it was a bad investment, or rather loss. Idea is good, but still in early phase, it should be treated as beta, and free, for now, butā€¦

Regards
Srdjan

#71

I have to agree with Srdjan here. Its a complete waste of money at this stage. Iā€™ve had Vue5 Infinite with Xstream. Hopeless. I gave up trying to get it to work. Iā€™ve been looking forward to getting Vue 6 Xstream hoping all the bugs would be ironed out, and also getting rid of the ā€œout of memoryā€ errors due to it now being 64Bit. Well, the memory errors have gone. But if I try to load ACTUAL real world terrains, (Iā€™m in the mining industry), and populate that, it takes forbloodyever to populate it in Xstream. Lets say about about 20 minutes for a piece of topography 10km x 5km. Then, when it does finally populate it, very sparsely might I add, I save it as a vue file. ā€˜All goodā€™ so far. Open the Vue file in Max, press the render button, CRASHHHHHā€¦

Max has no problem whatsoever loading these terrain data files. Iā€™ve been doing it for years. Iā€™ve used Forest Pro and put millions of mapped trees all over them to see whether its memory errors. No problems at all. I have 16Gbā€™s RAM on WinXP64. Introduce Xstream into the picture and the whole thing just crashes. And yes, Iā€™m using the 64bit version of Xstream.

If you want to use actual real world terrain data, all I can say is, forget it. Iā€™m hoping I can change this post one day and say that theyā€™ve got it working smoothly. I really doā€¦

#72

hi there,

just call tech support. they will help you.
They helped me already with many other tasks.

#73

Iā€™m using Vue xStream with Lightwave (actually, not even with Lightwaveā€¦I donā€™t have the guts to use it concurrently with any software) and itā€™s been a nightmare for me too.

Iā€™ve had the same problems as described by others above, plus not being able to see any cows on the render farm. Vue support is MIA and Iā€™ve got a show to deliver.

NEATO!

#74

Hi All,

Please dont hate me, but I love xstream with Lightwave, and have been able to do some cool stuff with it. Basically, it allows me to use my animated LW objects (characters with motionbuilder fbx files) and have them interact with the vue environments, particularly the atmospheres and shadows coming off the trees etc.
Yes, its not stable (you pretty much have to save after every adjustment) but you can difinatly get some awsome results, you probably couldnā€™t otherwise, without doing a crap load of stuff in a buch of other programs or plugins.

Who knows, it might end up stable one day.

#75

Hate? No way man! Iā€™m completely jealous! =)

I'm admittedly not using xstream as it's meant to be used.  I'm making crazy meta cloud formations and flying spaceships around in them.  It's driving me absolutely nuts that I can't spit out an alpha from the meta clouds, it's driving me nuts that it crashes on the farm, and it's driving me nuts that xstream randomly won't load up a file that it just saved out.
#76

Cool,

I definatly have issuesā€¦create a scene (lots of time spent) then save and cant reopenā€¦You should hear me scream, people think Iā€™m crazy!
I have scene with hypervoxles, pretty simple, crashes everytime during render as its starts to get into the middle of the cloud of smoke, both LW and vue just closes downā€¦Bang! GONE! just like that.
Also found little black squares in the images of a render sequence, each frame taking 15 minutes or soā€¦very random and unusableā€¦AH, what do you do?..But for the most part seems pretty stable. I suppose its pretty good with still images atm, but not confident with animations.

#77

Hello,

I've been using xstream for only a few weeks with max for creating an airport. we where orginally going to do every thing in v-ray but the time it was taking to produce each frame was unrealistic for our needs. So instead we switched to xstream to produce the sky, lighting, and trees around the airport. for the main plot of land we exported a proxy model from 3d max into xstream and then had a 7000x3000 map working on the plane. this proved to be the only way we could get a good idea of where assests lay in relation to each other as near 3d max objects where showing up in the xstream vue window or the vue objects where showing in the max view port until we rendered the scene in metal ray.

I wanted to ask if people have had problems with the plug in now rendering when in max. we have had a lot of instances where rendering from a camera created in 3d max, metal ray would just render a black screen, which has meant we need to baby sit any renders that go to the server incase they render a few hundred black screens.

The other was if it was normal for the xstream objects not to be appearing in the 3d max view port?

thanks guys.

#78

hello again,

after scatching my head for a bit i figured that in order to see the objects that are inside the xstream window u need to have 3d max in opengl mode. so in order for every thing to be seen inside xstream max you need to export the object to xstream, hide it in max. and then it should appear under the xstream node in your 3d max view port. hope this is helpful to some one :thumbsup:

#79

Iā€™m so happy reading this. I was on the point of buying it, being totally in love with the promised features, got a little error on the PLE (in fact, I got errors immediatly after opening max), searched around what to do, then I found this thread.
going to search on a little further.
thanx guys.

#80

Hello all,

First Vue is great softwares :slight_smile: I never regrets my buys !

Well about 3ds max and xStream thatā€™s right Vue <> Max synchro is clunkyā€¦but first be sure you are in opengl into 3dsmax and try to adjust xStream plugin OGL compatibility with 3ds max. I readed in manual thatā€™s 3ds max ogl have compatibility issues, so maybe itā€™s not e-on but Autodesk questions of ? donā€™t you think ? 3ds max 9 have a lot of display issuesā€¦

3dsmax -> utilities menu -> Vue xStream -> Options : Check Use Vueā€™s OGL ans try to play with still Vs Playback quality sliders.

If 3ds max vue synchro failed maybe try to use Vue Exporter when you 3ds max project is done, load it into Vue and render it with Vue :slight_smile:

You can speed up 3ds max vue syncrho rendering with select mentalray AA to 1/4 - 1.

As I tested all 3D softwares with xStream and the best to use with Vue actually is C4D, great feedback with synchro plugin.

Lightwave handle also Vue scene as well, just few camera placing troubles. Very important with LW and Vue rendering : you must use Perspective Camera !!

Normal camera render time is about 7m40s and with Perpsective about 1m48s !

For Maya thatā€™s work fine as I tested now.

Not tested Xsi for now :frowning: not time toā€¦

Be sure you always go to e-onsoftware.com -> my account and check for updates ! I know e-onā€™s guys release update often !

I hope my 2 cents tips and help can be usefull for somesā€¦