My render times are incredibly long in Vue Pro. Is anyone taking trees or tree anumations etc. into any other software and getting quality results?

Hi, Today I did a picture containing 6 conifer tree's and my final render time was running from 2h 56s, and very slowly, so am seriously considering going back to the normal 4 for while. At least we know that works !!!!!!! I have also have serious problems with the hypervue rendercow system. When I try to use autoscan it just freezes up the whole of VUE4 PRO and I have to come out of the programme and restart the whole thing. UGH. And that is with the new downloaded update. !!!!!!! Steve.

If you want to know how bad rendering times can get then try exporting some of those trees to Lightwave or some such. Vue is actually much quicker.

lululee have you done anything to make the scene less cpu intensive? Like putting distant objects on alpha planes, etc.

I got Vue Pro today and can not get rendercows to work on main computer which is windows 2000 or on another one that is windows 98. The 98 keeps giving and error that a PSAPI.dll can not be found. The 2000 machine will not find the rendercow. I can see this is going to be a while before everything is working the way it should. Render time is lots slower than on regular Vue 4.

Have you ever tried any other 3D software for rendering? With every 3D software in the world, people complain about the long rendering times. The nature od the game! Rendering is always the most time consuming thing while creating 3D images. The only thing that helps is a faster machine or a render farm - OR, be patient. I told it several times before, so my old friends will be bored, my longest render (in Bryce 4) run 3 weeks!!! Yes, 3 weeks for one image - part of a bigger calendar.

One little add on. How about writing a book "Zen and the art of waiting for 3D renders"? I think we shouldn't forget the meditative aspect in our waiting for renderings!

Render times can be so relative. I just did a nice complex render as a test: Size: 4000 by 3000 Mode: Final to screen Lights: Sun only, mapped shadows, Soft set to 1.0 Objects: 137, including 120 Pine Trees...About 1.7 million polygons total. Time to finish: 1 hour, 1 minute, 17 seconds on a P4, 2.4 gig computer with a gig of memory. More than half the time was spent on the anti-aliasing pass. Still, for a complex scene at 4000 by 3000 size, as hour is pretty quick! -SMT

Ok I'm starting the Zen book. Seems that is the only alternative.

One could expect all these Vue Pro problems from the start. E-on has a history a bringing out new products with TOO many bugs (read the word "too"). I just have to compare Vue 4.01 with Photoshop 7.01 or Cinema 4D 8.001 to know how buggy E-on's new products always are. Don't try to convince me differently; you won't succeed, no discussion possible. I know that I'll wait until Vue Pro 4.1x is released and let you all be beta tester for E-on. Sorry, but I don't feel like paying THEM $499 so that I can be their beta tester... makes no sense to me. Just my 2 cents.

Two questions. When you don't want to discuss, what are you doing here? And one remark. Most software companies have a big idol - Microsoft. Regarding Photoshop. What was the first version you have worked with? My first version was two! Very buggy as far as i can remember. And the first version on Windows, ooh, uuh.

I posted my opinion and if you can't handle that... well sorry, that's your problem, not mine. Sadly for you life isn't only about people who agree all the time and to be honest; that's a good thing. Your comparisons of applications with operating systems(!) confirms again why I don't feel the need to go in discussion about the stability of their new releases, when people come up with these ridiculous examples. It's also very silly of you to compare Vue Pro that was released this year with Photoshop 2.0, released in 1990, that's 13 years ago, the year that Windows 3.0 was released, some five years before Windows 95... In 1990 people were still using 486 computers until the Pentium was released in 1993. Sorry, but you're talking rather foolish Wabe and it shows that I can't discuss if if I wanted to...

Okay Gaussian... Hoow abooout a more recent program to compare... how about Lightwave 6.0? Cost at the time was retail $2495 and it was far buggier than Vue4Pro is right now. Newtek rewrote alot of the base code and I'm sure E-On did to create "trees swaying in the breeze." And as far as E-On releasing programs with "too many bugs" as you say, I found the release of Vue 3 rather bug-free. I didn't have any problems with it. So... obviously your statement above it YOUR opinion and you are entitled to it. I think that Wabe was trying to say is... why bother to say anything at all? If you want to voice your opinion start another thread. Your response has nothing to do with the rendering time issue and everything to do with bashing E-On. Since you've already made up your mind and can't be convinced otherwise... really, why bother to even say ANYTHING? Just want to vent? And as Smallspace stated above, his rendering time for what he had in his scene didn't seem that bad. What other software have you used that can render scenes with millions of polygons faster? It's okay too have your opinion, but instead of just saying that E-On releases buggy software, why don't you list your bugs through the the years instead of just saying that all of their software is released buggy? I personally think that Wabe's comparison of PhotoShop was valid - just because it was quite a while ago doesn't make it any less so. But that's YOUR opinion and not mine. This is MY opinion. Megalodon

Thanks Megalodon. No need to add anything to it.

Gaussian : "I can't discuss if I wanted to".... You've said you did not want. So give us a break boy, stop talking bul.... ! Even if a soft contains 1 or 2 bugs, you can't spit on the hard work of a team like this. It shows just two things : you don't know what is the job, and as long as you despise people you are the only despicable one. The only bug I see (in this forum) is you.

Hey Gloubi.... come on, simmer down! :) We're all here to try and help each other and there are times when we all get annoyed and frustrated and need to vent. We'll just chaulk up Gaussians'comments as "being really frustrated with the software." Vue4Pro has frustrated me and I've been in contact with Tech Support and I'm hoping that the problem will be solved in the next patch. We'll see. My whole point is that there really is no need to bash E-On here. I find no fault with citing specific problems - it's just that when negative generalizations are applied it gets out of hand. This has happened with other companies before and will continue to happen - do we want it to? No. Is it something that we have to deal with? Yes. Most of the people in this forum are Vue users and like the software - otherwise they wouldn't be participating. Let's move on past it and help E-On make better software which will in turn give us better tools to make even more incredible images. I am truly looking forward to what E-On has in store for VuePro! I think they're headed in the right direction. Megalodon

My final comments for thios thread: Here are my arguments Wabe, Gloubi and Megalodon. I must say that I wonder why I commented again, when a) Wabe has proven to make silly comparisons and therefore can't be taken very serious by me. b) Gloubi and Megalodon have no homepage/gallery and so they can't be taken serious either, but then again, that's MY opinion. I stated that E-onsoftware has a reputation of producing software that contains a lot of bugs. People deny that, even when its very well-known among those who know E-on for quite a while. People don't like me for having an opinion that is based on facts and years of observations since Vue dEsprit 2. They tell me that it was not the appropriate thread. Since when do the rules say that I have to make statements like this in a dedicated thread and why would I open a new thread in which I would draw much more attention. Im not here to flame, I made a comment about their software bugs and crashes and nothing else. If you cant handle that, then you go somewhere else. Im allowed to have this opinion, period. I have respect for the company, I have respect for their product, but I dont have respect for them when it comes to creating software in which the bugs are kept under control, because they just have TOO many. a) The 4.00 dEsprit and now the Pro release always create a lot of posts in forum of people whore having problems. I visited other application software forums, but Ive seldom (not never, but seldom) seen people talk so many times about bugs, crashes and updates, when is the new update coming because this doesnt work, opengl, etc, etc b) Ive read a few reviews of Vue dEsprit in which the reviewer clearly states that the product is buggy in some areas c) I have my personal experience; I cant get OpenGL to work, not on a Nvidea or my new ATI card. Both work fine in with OpenGL in Cinema 4D. It was only until several updates of Vue, that I saw some non-OpenGL related crashes disappear. d) Photoshop, Dreamweaver, FoxPro, highly professional programs of 3 different companies, but yet they only release in general 1 update. Obvious that the products are stable and yes, it also shows when you use them. None of the 3 programs ever crashed on me, except for one crash in Photoshop, that was related to my graphics driver; I updated it and the problem was solved. Terragen is made one man; it never crashed on my system, Wings 3D is free, it never crashed on my system. Ive included all the bugs (they mention 5 random crashes!) of Vue 4 Pro since its release not so long ago. Ive also included all the bug-fixes between Vue d'Esprit 4.00 and 4.12. I count at least for example 26 times the word crash. In one line they don't even talk about a crash, but various crashes all over. I make this very clear: I like Vue dEsprit a lot and I will continue to use it, but dont tell me that Im not allowed to give my opinion about the quality of the software when it comes to bugs and crashes, when you cant back up your opinion. Its the crashes that I dont like, not the program. When are you guys going to understand that I guess never Vue 4 Pro Missing Synchronization plug-ins will be downloaded to application folder (Synchro Plugins folder). Cinema4D Synchronization plugin now handles target spotlights and cameras properly. Synchronization data is now properly restored when reloading a scene containing synchronized objects. VueProRenderCow updater will be downloaded to application folder (RenderCowProUpdate). No more fading out problems when using texture anti-aliasing with recomputed subrays traveling through volumetric materials. No more weird colors on variable transparent objects when using texture anti-aliasing. Shadow density property in the light shadow editor is now properly saved when leaving the editor. Network rendering with G-Buffer now supported. Depth and alpha channel discontinuities on the boundaries of tiles eliminated. Network rendering with Poser objects fixed. OBJ module now imports materials correctly. New 3DS import scheme which handles pivot point and local coordinates for objects. When exporting an object, large texture map are only generated when appropriate. Post processing could disappear when canceling the camera editor. Post processing not loaded properly in some cases. Random crash when deleting lights. Random crash when opening the undo last operations list. Crash when a disconnecting render cows. Inverted images not rendered correctly over a network. Random crash when exporting atmospheres. Problem with navigation keys on Mac. Random crash when dragging materials in the world browser on Mac. Vue dEsprit bugs since between 4.00 and 4.12 Crash when entering a file name without extension in Render to Disk Options. Crash when changing the name of a layer before opening or creating a scene. 3D View titles were not erased (problems with japanese caracters). Now possible to enter Japanese text. Scene preview title not updated when changing camera name in world browser. Unable to find "Poser.exe" under special circumstances. VUE2 upgrade serial numbers not recognized if they were entered in lowercase. Crash when splitting meshes. COB models with long map names refuse to load. OBJ models that contain parts with UV info, and parts without refuse to load. Crash when loading Poser scenes with some UV mapped parts, and others not. Bad material distribution when loading certain Poser scenes (e.g. Mike). Improved BUM support and bump mapping conversions of Poser scenes. Genitals in Poser models would not be imported. Random problems registering certain extra vegetations purchased with Vue 3. Impossible to create the Vue 4 specific vegetations under Japanese OS. Crash when loading colormapped Targa pictures. Problem rendering volumetric spot lights that point at the camera. Volumetric lights rendered behind transparent objects wouldn't render correctly. Caustics would not render if light source was inside a primitive. Sun light called "Soleil" in some preset atmospheres. Replicating objects would sometimes produce unexpected results. Objects dragged out of groups in the World Browser would keep a link to the group. Memory leaks when dragging object in and out of groups in the World Browser. Bad selection of previously selected group members after dragging into a group or undoing the last operation. Tooltips would sometimes appear spuriously. Frame selected/All would fail if one of the orthogonal views is maximized. Option now grayed if not relevant. Dragging to the material preview in the material editor is now possible. Drag-Dropping materials in the material summary would not always remove duplicate materials. Mixed materials/Object orientation option not always restored in material editor. Interlaced GIFs couldn't be loaded. Alpha Planes created from Tiff files with alpha info lose alpha info after a save. Planets would reflect strangely in water. VR export not always available in picture format lists. Occasional crashes when filtering terrain altitudes. Problems rendering volumetric & fade-out materials if camera is inside object. Pressing Alt-Space to drag the views would crash. Default material/function preview options not applied correctly when overriding. Lens flares not rendered correctly when using a panoramic camera. Crash when selecting several layers that were folded up. Bitmapped materials would not follow object orientation as expected in Object Space. IME disfunctions when entering Japanese text under Win95/98. Added multi-lingual support. Under certain conditions, render would freeze at 100%. Impossible to directly assign a material to a group of objects containing different materials. Improved tolerance to faulty OpenGL drivers. Torus's with modified thickness (rim radius) would not save/restore properly. Rare render freeze when rendering high resolution terrains. Importing complex Poser scenes would sometimes fail. Save scene icon not activated when using the Camera Control Center. Exporting terrain maps without specifying a file extension would crash. Requesting other picture formats than BMP through the Batch Renderer would corrupt the picture. Some transparent areas in Poser would appear gray in Vue. Mixed materials would occasionally switch from High altitudes to Low altitudes during edition. Problems when entering manually a clip altitude > 100 in the Terrain Editor. In wireframe mode (non OpenGL) the ground plane would be hidden. In function editor, layer summary not updated when Turbulence and Fractal options are checked. Crash when animating the camera using the Mover Wizard and there is no ground Now displays a warning when stopping a render and the render cannot be resumed later (Final or better modes only). The render mode would stay set to Preview when resuming render, resulting in the message "You are about to save a Preview picture..." when saving the picture (Final or better modes only). Glow not appearing around transparent objects. Transparent areas would sometimes appear white in volumetric lights. Objects disappear in locked layers. Views were not refreshed when dragging and dropping objects between layers with different status. Only one try was accepted instead of five when adding extra vegetation species. In Fractal Terrains Options dialog, pressing Cancel would not cancel the modifications made to the filters. Pasting or loading a material via the menu onto a group of objects made out of different materials would not apply the material. Materials mixed with other modes than "Full blend" would not exhibit bumps properly. Crash when removing all members of a Boolean Difference. Problems when rendering Boolean operations involving 3D Mesh objects. Saving an atmosphere without lens flare did not work, and sometimes made Vue crash when loading it. Vue crashed when setting lens flare intensity to zero. Space-dragging in the timeline wouldn't move the line representing current time. 16 bit RG encoded terrain data import fixed. Pict export has been rewritten on both platforms. Spotlights not drawn correctly in Wireframe. Changing the type of file in the file browser wouldn't change the extension. Mac Specific Fixes: Now possible to add extra vegetation species. Nudge keys not working. Problems with wireframe draw appearing outside Vue (OpenGL disabled). Last selected item in browser not memorized. Drawing a selection box without background draw didn't work. Material and function previews were not always updated correctly. Vue crashed when rendering on disk very large pictures (>5000 pix wide). 16 bit RG encoded terrain data export fixed for all formats. Saving to a file at the root of a volume did not work. Application not updated correctly when restored after being hidden (Cmd H). Render progress hidden behind render when rendering to screen. Jpeg quality slider is now limited to 0 through 100%. Windows Specific Fixes: BUM file format not working on some systems (thanks Sacred Rose!) Image mapped bumps not applied correctly on rotated objects in Object Space mode. Bad shadows cast on boolean operations involving polygon meshes. Now possible to animate gels. Restored default system file browsers instead of custom browsers (except under Mac OS X v10.0.x; strange colors appear on OS X due to a bug in the OS - not our fault...). Bump maps were slightly offset relative to the color maps. Very rare problem when rendering polygon meshes with no thickness. Anti-aliased and Receive shadow material properties not saved/restored properly. Field interlacing options inverted in Advanced Animation Options dialog. Mixing transparent materials with different fade out colors would produce an unexpected fade color. Sunlight auto-decay not saved in standard atmosphere model. Volumetric materials not animated correctly. Incorrect panoramic renders in multi-processor mode. The Animation File Format Options box sometimes appears for the wrong format after changing file format with browser. Spherical and cylindrical mappings were flipped horizontally. Warning: mappings created with Vue 4.05 or earlier will be flipped horizontally in 4.06 (enter -1 X axis Picture scale to compensate). The views tooltip did not appear when OpenGL was enabled. Corrupted alpha channel when rendering to disk with anti-aliasing. Objects with the "Main view only" or "Hidden" properties would still appear in wireframe mode. "Sunlight masked by clouds" not restored after canceling modifications in Atmosphere Editor. Strong noise would appear when rendering some imported meshes with reflective materials. Crash when saving multiple objects or objects with linking/tracking. Problem when using Effects brush before and after changing terrain resolution. Problem when using Undo/Redo brush after changing terrain resolution. Reduced the height of Stones, Pebbles and Fir Trees, and made it independent of terrain resolution. Fixed Grit, Gravel and Stairs Effects brush modes. Memory leak when rendering some boolean operations that involve groups. Very bright highlights would sometimes appear quantized. Now displays a warning when attempting to save a PICT file larger than 4095 pixels. Crash when using arrows with drop down lists. Problem with Japanese and other "exotic" text inputs. Print preview and print preferences would crash. Terrain exports would crash in file selection. TIFF export crashes. Random deadlocks in Wireframe preview mode. The scene preview did not work when the main view was maximized. View tooltips could appear above modal dialogs. Crash when closing sub-dialogs of the light gel material editor. Render not displayed in main view when using single threaded OpenGL mode. Rendering can now be aborted by clicking in the render. Random crashes due to conflicting threads. Tooltips would appear even when application was collapsed. Dragging a file onto an open scene would crash. Views not refreshed after hiding/restoring application. Now uses standard Mac "File modified, save?" message buttons. Drag-drop operations show a picture of the dragged element. PICT file format not working when Quicktime not installed. Turbulence and Transformation dialogs refuse to open twice in the Function Editor. Low-res pictures imported into the Terrain Editor would be badly interpolated. Planets would drop under the ground when animating them. Negative Volumetric Spotlights would deadlock instead of creating a "shadow volume". Some group objects created in Vue 2 would suddenly "collapse" when loaded and moved around in Vue 4. Depth channel not saved. Texture antialiasing option not saved/restored. Save/restore of turbulence combination mode fixed. Problem when setting lens flare anamorphism to values less than 1. Data copied to the clipboard wouldn't be readable in other apps. Crash when deleting a could layer with animated clouds and the Atmosphere is not animated otherwise. Problem rendering glow to disk. Creating a new camera now activates the "Save scene" icon. Corrected some lighting problems in the clouds. Rotated Infinite planes would not always be lighted correctly. Dragging the border of one of the views causes the views to vanish. Rotating a multiple selection of objects at non zero time would not rotate the objects as expected. Potential deadlock when switching a looping animation from standard to helicopter. Some interference between Jaguar and Windows OpenGL fixed. Problem after undoing/cancelling terrain editor Options modifications. Mover animations would always begin at t=0, even if the initial geometry keyframe was moved. Pictures that had been rotated/inverted would not render correctly using Mover 4's RenderCow. Unable to abort a HyperVue render when saving the animation as independent frames. Crash in the Terrain Editor (due to AltiVec), in the Material Editor (due to multithreading) in Timeline (expand preview and current time slider). Various crashes all over... Slight problem in Terrain Editor/Fractal parameter options. Problem when rendering One Sided objects from inside (e.g. rain tutorial not working). OBJ files would not load under 10.1. Problem with access paths containing special characters inside 3DS files on 10.1. Problem when saving very large files. Miscellaneous Jaguar fixes. Fixes some display driver problems with Win98 (wireframe mode).

Funny. I still don't get your point. But no surprise by silly me! I will not argue therefore. The only thing i am surprised of as well is, seeing so many people creating excellent images with such a shitty software.

Gaussian, Again you've wasted alot of space saying nothing. You say Wabe has made silly comparisons. Yeah, YOU feel they're silly while others do not. And just to say that they're silly is derogatory and a remark better kept to yourself! Oh... and since Gloubi and I don't have a homepage/gallery... we can't be taken seriously? Okay Gaussian, how pathetic is THAT statement? Let me explain something to you: I am a business owner (for over 8 years) and have used Lightwave and Vue (among MANY other programs) PROFESSIONALLY for a long time. I RARELY have time to sit down and experiment and do R&D let alone make pretty pictures and post them in a gallery for YOU to see. I make money with the software I use. I make money with VUE! You take so much time and space to list ALL of the problems that Vue had because E-On listed all of the problems for you so you could copy/paste. How nice of them to provide this for you. E-On is one of MANY software developers that have had lots of problems with a version of software. Do you think Adobe didn't have problems? A former boss of mine worked for Adobe as a salesman and he told us of professionals coming to him with their problems concerning crashes and bugs. And gee... I wonder how much larger Adobe is compard to E-On and how many more resources they can put into a product? Gee.... I wonder.... And why do you have to be so dopey and say that we said you can't have your opinion? MY specific problem with your post is that you generalized saying that their software has always been buggy and that you need to specify what YOUR problems were. Perhaps if you had done that in the beginning you wouldn't have wasted all of this space! But noooo, you have to PROVE your point by listing everything that E-On listed. Do you think that all other companies make a similar list of ALL of their fixes? If you do you're dreaming. You "stated that E-onsoftware has a reputation of producing software that contains a lot of bugs" - I disagreed saying that I had vitually NO problems with Vue3. You have YOUR opinion and I have mine. And it's quite interesting that you called Wabe's software comparison silly and yet you completely ignored mine concerning Lightwave. Obviously you don't want to remark on anything that would make sense. Interesting. Continue to have your opinion and bash E-On even though "I like Vue dEsprit a lot and I will continue to use it" instead of offering contructive information. Sure, that's fine. You're a big help! It's okay to express an opinion, but when you just want to add fuel to a fire with nothing constructive to say... well... why don't you just say NOTHING?! Keep it going Gaussian! Megalodon

Good bunfight considering everyone likes Vue and will continue to use it : ) What was the question again?

I think it was something along the lines of... is peanut butter and jelly REALLY a good combination? ;)

HOLY @#$% thats a long post eh! anyways eon has pissed me off too but to make up for that they have helped me out as soon as they could, and must I say that exceeded my expectations from eon. Eon has created something different.I agree with the photoshop example or windows example. Wait till eon comes out with vue 7 or 10/12 ANYTHING, they are stepping into big industry and 10-15yrs are needed to make a solid bug free software. I can assure you that by vue6 or 7 it will be 99.9% bug free since there is never 100%. Steve and Amanda from eon are cool, they help me out. In otyher words vue is getting there, give it some time and also eon isn't BIG like adobe or microsoft, so don't expect it to be a corporation.

Attached Link: http://www.dorje-pictures.net

Gloubi, beautiful website. Congratulations. Excellent pictures and excellent design.