First of all, I don't have Vue d'Esprit myself (yet!), but I always look at the images posted here at renderosity and one thing is bugging me for quite some time now. Why are in general the colours in the Vue d'Esprit images so dull ? Aren't there possibilities to change or add more lighting spots ? This is important in my opinion because lightning can make or break an image. I mention this because I see such great compositions and then the dullness kills it for me ! I am just very curious and would like to see all of you Vue artists prove me wrong about the colours, I dare you :) Greetings from a wannabee Vue user, Anne

You could add light as you want, use volumetric light (Vue4 or 4pro), ... Concerning the colors you can choose what you want ;=) No, Vue is not dull at all. Maybe the september challenge (out of Vue), will demonstrate it, who knows ? ;=) Yves

I understand what you mean: Vue does have a "painterly" feel to it. I've used Bryce and have just bought Carrara both of which can produce quite stark, photo-like images.

One of Vue's strengths is the ability to create realistic haze, fog, clouds and muted sunlight just like in the real world.

Most Vue users produce landscapes which, due their very nature, are comprised predominantly of greens, greys and browns. OK so it's an over simplification of the glorious creation around us, but you get the idea:-)

Please also remember that all images posted to the gallery are crunched down from their original large file size. Something is always lost in that conversion process, usually the vegetation detail, which contributes to "flattening" the image.

However, Vue most definitely is more than capable of producing bright colours.

As to your dare, the last two works I've posted were partly experiments with vivid colouring in Vue. (I like things bright!) There are plenty of other examples in the Vue galleries. If you say what kind of image you want to see, I'm sure someone here will rise to the "mini-challenge" and post something from Vue matching your spec.

Finally, have you checked your monitor? It wasn't until I bought a good LCD screen that I realised what my old Sony CRT hadn't been showing me!

YL: I will keep a close eye on the challenge ! BigGreenFurryThing: First of all I love your latest Techie Trekkie ... very cool ! Concerning the monitor, I look at the images on three different monitors (an old one which doesn't have the brightest colours indeed), a brand new LCD monitor and at work at a 19" monitor) so I can compare it and I can see it at all monitors :) You are right about the fact that it is most of the time with large vegetation images that I get that 'dull' feeling. I don't say that the images are bad. Some are really outstanding, but they all look a bit similar. I get the feeling that all those are rendered with the default lighting settings. But it's all in my humble opinion. I know there are plenty of good examples of what Vue can do :) I just wanted to point it out because I get the feeling some people just don't know how to brighten up an image by using more spotlight at certain areas. I brought it up because I know Vue has a lot of potential and as soon as I have some money left I will buy it straight away. Until then I have to do it with your cool renders and just thought I might give you Vue users something to think about. In my opinion Renderosity shouldn't be only to display your work but to learn also. I know I've learned a lot from critical users in the Bryce, Terragen and MojoWorld forums ! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights !! Anne BTW: the August 2003 winning image is also one of those good examples of great colours in Vue ofcourse !

It's not the lighting that makes the image look dull. I'm not sure what "dull" stands for here, I think you mean sort of graininess in an image?
This is mainly caused by the simple fact that Vue can handle "only" 25 sub-rays. You can see it in extremely soft shadows and when using strong depth of field.
For comparison, Bryce 5 can smack images with 256 rays per pixel -meaning eternity-slow rendering but good quality of an image if other parts of Bryce-image are set OK.

I have no idea if Vue Pro handles more sub-rays -I was going to ask it when starting this post- so I can't tell whether images rendered with VuePro differ from Vue4-stills

I'm pretty new to Vueing around, but when I was asked to make an animation of tornado hitting a house, I had to choose between Lightwave and Vue. I chose making that 3second tv-spot with Vue because of the number of sub-rays -the grains gave the effect of dirt to be blown around. In action that meant lots of faster rendering with somewhat neat result.

Again, I'm new to Vueing and therefore don't know how "seniors" post-produce their still images with, but I've found that when making stills with strong DoF or soft lighting, programs like Neat Image Pro and Photoshop are my best friends: NIpro kicks grain out of the image and color correction and enhancement can be done in Photoshop.

Images in Renderosity's galleries, I think, are mostly made with only rendering image in Vue -if you post image through dozen different programs, the result is hardly an image only fitting to Vue d'Esprit gallery.

Hope this answered your question -even touched the topic:)

.mjt

Ok Dull was not the right description (but caught your attention). I think hazy and grainy are better words indeed. I think you all are clarifying a lot for me and I think that when I buy Vue I will definitely pay attention to your comments !! Hopefully others will profit from your comments as well ! Anne

By "hazy and grainy", you may mean the atmospherics and ambient light a lot of folks use. Vue does a lot of nifty stuff with atmospherics, and by using the haze and fog, along with ambient lights, I tend to get a hazier feeling to my images. It depends on what effect I want in my image. At least half the time, I lean away from ambient lighting towards more direct lighting, usually add several more lights as well as sunlight. But then, art and opinions are subjective, aren't they? I'm looking out my window right now, and the sky is a bit dull and overcast, and the colors in the landscape are a bit muted. "Hazy and grainy." Suggest you go back through the gallery, you will see plenty of vivid coloring in Vue renders.

Hazy and grainy can be avoided. Just possible to remove any fog and haze, and render to the best quality (user setting at minimum since Vue3). Light setting is also important...See for instance the september challenge pic above, does is look dull to you ? The colors are bright, seems to have not ambient, all the objects are very clear and net (seems no fog and haze). There are some other examples of that in the gallery (why not surfing through it?) ;=)

To me, it's the opposite. Vue is the one with the crisper renders, which is actually why I switched from Bryce. I always found Bryce to be not so crisp with no way to shut that off, no matter how I played with the settings. In Vue, you can shut off the atmospheric effects so that the image is chrystal clear with vibrant colors, such as agiel's image above, or you can have a very painterly degree of atmospheric effects to fit the mood. The choice is up to the artist, which is what I like about Vue.

I find that a lot of ambient light will give your picture a grainy look. The default Vue lighting has a lot of ambient since many new Vue users use the default lighting their images tend to look grainy. I found when reading posts and tutorials that many of the more seasoned Vue artists tend to steer away from a lot of ambient light. When I lowered or eliminated ambient light in my scenes my images looked sharper and less grainy.

Dave

Throw your images in Photoshop and fiddle with contrast and curves and add some highpass sharpening and your images will look much better. I agree with you, without some extra adjustments, the colors look a bit washed out.

I must add that haze and fogs are very difficult to adjust. I mean you want haze and fog in the background, you will have even a little amount of this in the foreground. Which will makes your pictures a little bit uniform in look. Very difficult to adjust. As it has been said above, try to highly decrease ambient light, which makes picture appear flat and dull. You will have to replace them by additional lights. That's why, a new Vue picture should always been done with a real "scratch" atmosphere. An atmosphere with zero ambient, zero fog, zero haze, white sky,...Creat it then save it and always begin a new scene with it, you can adjust the new atmosphere after... Beware there are other settings I don't know in Vue4 which are related with atmospheres and could disturb your "zero" atm. Yves

A simple example showing what can be otain with Vue. You can do the same for landscape of course, if you modify some default Vue textures which are not always great for vegetation. There is only one sun here which produce soft shadows (thus requiring user setting quality, here only 9 subrays per pixel, and best quality) . Of course black parts could be removed by adding a filling light in the right, but this took 40 min for render (933MHz only) so... Will try with no soft shadows, keep tune...

Euh, thats only a Vue3, with Vue4 there are lot of others features like volumetric lights, reaslitic caustics,...

This one took only 5 minutes in highest render quality, 5 filling point lights, one sun light no soft shadows. Let us see with plants now...

Ok I'll try to show you what I mean: This is one of those 'typical' Vue renders to me, by that I mean that I can spot right of the thumbnail that it is a Vue render just by the colors ... I think this is an excellent image, it's one of my favorites last weeks, but it shows you what I mean concerning the colours (pale green). If it was ment to be this way than it's ok , but since I spot a lot of images with this kind of colours I don't think this is the case for the majority. But ... I could be wrong :) Mind this ... all this is ment to be positive criticism !! I think Vue rocks and as I stated before .. I would love to have it, just don't have the money right now. I think you experienced Vue users might just give the less experienced ones some tips on how to improve their images (and reading all that's written in this thread I know I allready learned a lot !) Thanks for the replies ! Anne

The next image has much better looking green IMHO ... PS Please nobody tells me about looking at other Vue images again, I have seen EVERY image on renderosity for the last three months ! That's why I started this thread ... because I've seen so many !!! Cya Anne

Both are great pictures, the last has modified the default Vue textures (probably) and has yellow light which makes look the pic more hot. Every 3D soft allow to modify the textures/colors to obtain what you want. Vue is a 3D renderer, it also allow to modify the tex as you want : want red plants? possible... want blue ones ? possible... Now I understand you want green one: that's possible...But sometimes changing default Vue tex... ;=) Yves

Now my last little example with PalmTree and default Vue textures, 1h10 for render in the best quality (but 33 light, possibility to reduce I think). Remember you can change the textures as you want. Yves

Beautiful gallery you have ACHPostma, with beautiful colors ! I think it could be possible to obtain the same results in Vue... An idea for a future challenge ? Yves

Here is a last one in low quality (just final) 1m35s render

Done in 5 minutes with just 1 color on the ground

Nice example YL !

Nice examples YL! As YL examples show you can create bright colors in Vue but there are times I dont want bright colors! For example in my picture Teutoberg Forrest bright colors would have made my image to cheerful and would killed the effect I wanted to create.

Dave

Thanks guys! Also try the Thomaskhran new website (just above), his gallery, and pmermino gallery at renderosity. They use bright colors and are among the best Vue artists ;=) Yves