Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5/

Those of you that have received an IM about the interactive magazine's new contest (themed "chivalry") will notice a number of prizes. 1st is Vue 4. 4th place is DAZ Bryce 5. Now obviously, being the Bryce zealot that I am, I kinda got annoyed. And so I went to look into Vue 4. Turns out v5 is on store shelves right now. And frankly, it's a whole lot better than Bryce is at the moment, and arguably better than 5.5. Here's why:

Global Illumination and EasyGI
Capture the subtelty of natural light using Vue 5's all new Global Illumination engine!
And with EasyGIsingle slider quality setting, no need to worry about bucket sizes or other obscure parameters: you get the perfect blend of quality vs. render speed - each time!

Global Radiosity
Vue 5 proudly exhibits the first radiosity engine that will actually render infinite outdoor scenes in a finite amount of time! Although optimized for this type of outdoor rendering, Vue 5's radiosity engine can also produce very pleasing indoor renders.

HDRI and Image Based Lighting
Map any picture to the background or use High Dynamic Range Images to illuminate your Vue scenes. Ensure perfect blending with real photographic backgrounds!

Procedural Terrains
Create non-polygonal procedural terrains with infinite detail, enlarge them to the horizon or fine tune their shape using the standard Solid3D terrain modeling tools!

Advanced Atmospheric Engine
Combine Vue's advanced volumetric atmosphere system with the brand new Global Illumination engines! Setup Image Based Lighting with just one click!

Compatible With Vue Professional Plant Technology
Grow breathtakingly realistic 3D plants and trees and select from the 50+ plant presets to populate your scenes! Use new plant species created with Vue Professional's Plant Editor!

New Material and Function Editors, Parametric Mapping
Use the Basic or the Advanced Material Editor, create incredibly complex procedural shaders using the all new SmartGraph Function Editor, and accurately fit textures onto objects using the new parametric mapping mode!

Metablobs Organic Modeling
Use the brand new Metablob engine to melt Vue primitives (spheres, cubes...) together and create amazing organic models with seamlessly blending materials! Preview the final Metablob geometry in the OpenGL views!

3D Text Editor
Create amazing video titling effects thanks to the all new interactive 3D Text Editor. Design your own extrusion and beveling profiles and easily apply custom materials!

Pre-Animated Mesh and Poser Support
Load pre-animated Vue meshes, combine them with Vue's internal animation engine and instantly add life to your projects (you can also still import static Poser 4&5 content)!

Integrated Post-Processing and Camera Switching
Apply post-processing effects (gamma, color correction...) internally and benefit from the full 96 bit color resolution instead of working on the usual 24 bit images. Animate post-processing effects and switch cameras during animations!

Advanced OpenGL Engine
Preview scenes in real-time with textures, plants, atmospheres, planets, Boolean operations, Metablobs... Reap the benefits of hardware acceleration or use default software implementation and wireframe modes for maximum compatibility!

Maximum Compatibility
Vue 5 implements fault protection technologies that monitor your system's activity and intercept potential memory allocation failures to minimize any risks of losing data.
The optional compatibility mode will minimize any potential incompatibilities with particular setups.
Numerous Interface Improvements
Vue 5 features hundreds of minor interface improvements such as a new convenient Image browser, improved multi-tasking, per-object material browsing, global numeric resizing, improved handling of missing texture maps, new "superior" rendering preset, pressure sensitive terrain editing, etc.
Compatible with Mover 5
Vue 5 Esprit is compatible with Mover 5. Mover 5 lets you import fully animated Poser 4/5 characters, combine them with Vue's own animation engine and render the resulting animation accross a network of up to 5 computers. Interaction with animated Poser characters has been greatly accelerated.

Now what does this mean. Obviously a number of these things are going to be present in Bryce 6 as well -afaik anyway: GI, HDRI, and possibly Radiosity. The procedural texture editor looks logical and easier to use, although basing itself on the same general ideas as Bryce's. Procedural terrains, on the other hand, are a huge plus

Metablobs are a different type of metaballs, although having ALL primitives with this option is a major plus. The text-maker thing is okay, although not terribly useful or groundbreaking. The tree lab and even the presets themselves are miles away from Bryce's.

All in all Vue 5 is where Bryce 5 should have been (read: metaballs and tree lab) if Corel would have bothered. If DAZ comes out with a GOOD product as opposed to a craptastic Pumeco-ish one then the playing field might be equalized. It is quite clear though where DAZ has looked for its inspiration when outlining the updates it plans for Bryce 6. Give Bryce a solid non-boolean modelling capability and a comparable Poser import-export niche and it might eventually do better.

Drac

Message edited on: 10/19/2004 08:34

If it werent for Vues disgusting zooming tool and the less good terrain editor, it would actually be a good product...

i remember trialing vue4 at one point actually. it's not that bad. you have to admit though, it's where bryce would have been either if corel would have continued to update it or if they would have finished the job properly all those years ago.

I'm still learning Vue 3..;)

Blasphemy!

Not saying Vue is bad, its not at all. But most of it can be accomplished within our old Bryce already, and some with the help of free apps. And you still have to weight quality vs speed. Not exactly ground breaking. But this will most likely attract many Brycers and newbies, and yeah, Bryce would definitely have been past this point if Corel, sorry, the primates, had done their job. We can only hope that a Bryce 6 will give Vue a run for its money. Btw, 96 bit color resolution??? Anyone here have a monitor that supports higher then 32?

Man, I really hate the way some software companies are degrading the term Radiosity. The only true Radiosity is what Cornel U. developed in the early 90's and it's a very acurate front end simulation of the thermal characteristics of the lighting in a scene (it's not a render system!). Vue5 ain't doing that - just that comment on "will actually render infinite outdoor scenes in a finite amount of time!" tells it all becuase a true Radiosity solution would take forever to calculate just the thermal transfer on an infinite scene - before it even starts rendering. My best guess from looking at the images posted is that it's a reverse raytracer, probably borrowed from the OpenSource Radiance renderer. Best; Dan the Nit Picker

About 2 years ago I bought Vue4 in the box with an extra CD full of stuff. Tried it, uninstall it. Tried it one more time, uninstalled it. Just didn't like the UI. Images are fine, just couldn't get a hold on the handles. Never regged it. If anyone is interested let me know. (cheap-cheap)

Rod
ICM ps it's in excellent shape(everything there including reg card)

Message edited on: 10/19/2004 11:37

Hey ICM, trade ya a copy of World Builder 3.1 standard,lol.

I have Vue 4 and still have it installed and still use it on rare occasions(ducks for cover),........one thing I did like about it(ducks again), it is multi-threading, it uses two processors, something I pray that Bryce 6 will address(for those of us fortunate enough to have multi-processor machines). However, in comparison to Bryce I find it annoying in the extreme,.....the inability to change to Open GL view without having to close the app and restart is a major pain. The UI is a jumble, as someone said the handles are frustrating at best,.......etc. I did look at Vue Pro seriously,....until I saw the price(want to convince me, sell it to me as a Bryce user for $99) ! The one major plus of Vue was and is the atmospheres, in my opinion far superior to Bryce(something else that needs to be addressed in Bryce 6), you can get good looking skies in Bryce but it's alot of work, alot of work,......as far as the Bryce treelab,...well, I use the now defunct MECN Tree Factory for most trees(maybe Daz should get in touch with the guys from MECN and see if they can resurrect this app as a plug-in for B6), I much prefer the lighting setup in Bryce(much more flexible), all in all Bryce is just more comfortable for me.

I'm satisfied with Bryce. ;-) BTW, Rudy: "Btw, 96 bit color resolution??? Anyone here have a monitor that supports higher then 32?" They probably are just playing some marketing tricks adding up stuff, or somebody had made a typo. I've seen a NEC LCD that has 10-bit colour per channel instead of 8 bits. And in the next spring it will have a better, LED, backlight, giving it a colour space larger than AdobeRGB and NTSC. Even the current version is brilliant. The photo of the monitor looks like I photoshoped a picture onto it. Unfortunately, I left the pic at work so cannot post it here, but will do that tomorrow if you want. That LCD makes me seriously rethink my position re LCDs. And that's that for the near future, AFAIK. Anyway, there's an interesting discussion about the human eye and colour at http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=6620946565 which certainly more than you've ever thought of asking. :-)

Bit color; Computer video cards and monitors will only display 32-bit. (as of right now) Anything above 32-bit - the advantage lies within printing. Although you won't be able to see the extra colors on your PC, you can have an advantage in printing, as those extra colors can be/will be noticable on a print. (or traditional film, etc.) The same is true with anything that produces images over 32-bit, digital cameras, scanners, etc. AgentSmith

Erlik: That thread you posted is really interesting, Thanks!

Id never heard about anything higher then 32-bit, thats why i was curious. :) I understand about printing and better colors, but since much of the pixels disappear when printing, higher then 32 would, to me anyway, seem like overkill. Either way, 96 would be useless right now. :)

Bryce has an option to use 48 bit colors if I recall. Although the bit depth gets reduced to 32 or 24 for the finished image, the extra bits hold fractional values which are of importance when rendering. I believe this is important for keeping colors correct during calculations involving lights, transparancy, shadows, etc. If everything had to be rounded to whole numbers the transitions between colors wouldn't be as nice and cause more artifacts under certain conditions. I think this is mentioned somewhere under the rendering options section in Real World Bryce 4. I guess the 96 bit just means that they measure smaller fractional values which might make certain atmospheric effects appear better - even though they'll probably get reduced back to 32 bit for screen display purposes.

I'm just a simple Brycer who doesnt understand 99% of what draculaz said.Some good ideas in the last paragraph though!

I was very impressed with the new Vue5 features when I visited their site. There's a few pics in the Vue Gallery using the new Global Illumination. I found it VERY impressive. As Sackrat said, the Vue skies are FAR better than Bryce's. If you're not a good postworker (like me) good realistic skies mean a lot. That, along with all the other interesting features, will probably temp me to buy Vue5 and make the switch. But, I'll see what Bryce6 turns out to be. If it's just a Bryce5 with a faster renderer and not much else, then screw Bryce, I'm switching to Vue.

Jed: There's no such thing as a 'simple' brycer. Brycers are very intelligent people. Well, most of them anyway, ok....well...the majority....more than a few certainly........at least half if you include everyone who posts on this forum.......say, maybe a third......but if you include the newbies...well that makes.....what? 20%..?

Aren't HDRI images (.hdr) at 96 bit?

I'd have to agree that Vue does nice skies and pretty good volumetrics, but, Bryce seems to be alot easier to use and achieve fairly quick results. I have Vue 4, and every now and then am tempted to give it a chance, but, I'm just to damn faithful to Bryce. Let's just hope that DAZ listens to all the faithful and makes Bryce better than Vue, World Builder and Terragen combined, and keep it affordable so that people of all skills can pick it up.

"Anything above 32-bit - the advantage lies within printing. Although you won't be able to see the extra colors on your PC, you can have an advantage in printing, as those extra colors can be/will be noticable on a print. (or traditional film, etc.)" Errr, AS, CMYK is a smaller colour space than RGB. Which you certainly know from Photoshop, when that exclamation mark appears in the colour picker. HDRI is 64 bits, methinks.

I don't understand 99% of what Drac says anyway..;) But then these tired old eyes do fine with 1024x768 anyway..;)

Wait on Bryce 6 or switch to Vue 5? - this is the question....

My adventure with 3D started in 2002 when I get a free copy of Vue 2 with a magazine.
I was amazed that I could easily set quite complex scenes on this old (1997) software.
After a couple of weeks I became addicted to 3D and decided to purchase some more actual 3D software than 5 years old Vue 2 - I considered Vue 4, but I could not find it anywhere where I leave, so I bought the new Corel's Bryce 5. I was impressed by excellent works of such Bryce artists as Rochr, sbleci, rohi or beton, unfortunately I didn't knew that 80% of the effect they get was due to extensive 2D postwork applied on basic Bryce renders.

As I had only a short experience with Vue 2 interface I was not addicted to it's functionality, but what I found in Bryce was a total disappointment.
One may say that Bryce interface is "revolutionary", but for me it is simply not ergonomic. The major disadvantage of Bryce interface is the lack of 4 simultaneous views - the basic for any 3D application - still I can't understand why Bryce does not give such an option to the user...

The second big disadvantage is the lack of object manager - it's a real pain in as if you have to manage hundreds of objects without such useful tool as Vue object manager and its layer system allowing you to deactivate/hide groups of objects in one mouse click.

Rendering speed - Bryce is definitely the slowest render I ever worked with - I had impression that same quality was achieved with Vue 2 in 1/4 of Bryce time. Then I worked on a slow Celeron 600, and it took ages to render even simple scenes. On the same machine, working in Vue I could prepare and render nice scenes much quicker (just look into my gallery - I switched to Athlon 2000+ one year ago, all works before "striders in the sun" were made on Celeron 600)

Bryce terrain editor lets you edit only very basic shapes - no special geological effects - all terrains I could do with Bryce looked very artificial.

Bryce plant editor seemed to me very promising - it was something that old Vue 2 does not have - unfortunately what I was able to set with Bryce tree editor was much, much worst than Vue vegetation.

So after 2 weeks of bad experiments with Bryce 5, very disappointed I came back to Vue 2.

Today If you compare Bryce 5 and Vue 5, it is as if you was comparing a WWII Spitfire with a F-22.... It is beyond compare.
Unfortunately Bryce's days of glory passed away a long time ago, actually it is a very old software, with very little options. Of course this old tool in hands of very talented artists can still produce interesting results, but only after a very extensive 2D postwork, which makes it useless for quality animation.

What is the point in waiting for something that probably won't happen? I don't think that DAZ would be able to update Bryce to the extend that it could match Vue. They will continue what COREL did - they will suck from Bryce 5 as much as they can, then they will sell it to someone else. The talented team that conceived Bryce does not exist anymore - without their knowledge, the real development of Bryce is very unlikely.

In hands of unskilled people neither Bryce, Vue or Maya will produce interesting results, but if you have this precious gift to art , why confine to old software that limits your potential ?

Vue 5 new features are simply amazing - GI/radiosity/HDRI produce QUICKLY outstanding renders.
New graphic function editor allows you with almost limitless possibilities while setting new materials or new procedural terrains.
Import of objects works very well, even most of material information is correctly transferred.
Text editor is an amazing tool that enables you to model from simple font shapes very complex objects - just take a look on a sample scene I quickly set with ONLY font objects - (it was the first time I experimented with font editor).
Metablobs modeling also seems very interesting - you can "blob" cubes, pyramids, cylinders, tours, cones and of course, spheres - each can have its own material that would merge with other metablobed objects materials.
Not to mention previous Vue 4 features that makes Vue the easiest powerful 3D program available.

Hope to see you soon in Vue gallery :-))))

Cheers !

Robert

Message edited on: 10/20/2004 13:28

Hi Robert. Never thought E-on would hire you to do their dirty work. Well, i know what you can crank up in Vue, and im always impressed, but you can probably understand, when i disagree about most of the things here. Yeah, i use a lot of postwork in some images to save time, im not a purist, but very far from 80%. An image like that, wouldnt be posted in the Bryce gallery at all. You cant be a magician with the postwork, the scene with the proper base lighting must already be there, unless you want to re-draw the entire image by hand/change all shadows etc etc. Check out Traffic here as an example. An early render and the final image. So on most images, the postwork only contains of some light/color work. Nothing you could call cheating, especially now, when some of the things i do in Photoshop, can be made directly in Vue. After having the opportunity to betatest Vue5, i can safely say that its not for me. I didnt even finish up the test period. Theres nothing wrong with the program, but for me, it was simply unworkable, with far to awkward controls for my taste. The Bryce interface IMO, works far better, and im not the least limited by the app. This is naturally all about personal liking, but i would choose Bryce5 any day. Still love your scenes though. :)

Hi Rudolf ! By saying 80% I meant that the effect you get after postworking relatively basic Bryce scenes is much, much better than original renders, which - you must admit it - doesn't look very good. Exactly as you show in your post above. That may work for illustration purpose, but not for animation. I was mislead by such wonderfully postworked pictures and purchased Bryce, thinking I would be able to achieve such great results with Bryce alone. Maybe that's why now I prefer to achieve correct result directly in 3D. If you prefer to stay with Bryce, I wish you that your new employer DAZ3D prepares Bryce 6 as good and powerful as Vue 5 actually is :-)) Finally the most important tool that helps us to create great scenes lies between our ears ;-)) - without it any software would be useless junk. I look forward for your new amazing SF scenes & wish you a lot of imagination & creativity - as usual :-)) Cheers ! Robert PS. By the way, my opinion about Vue/Bryce was the same 2.5 year ago - long time before e-on invite me to beta test their product. You can check it on my website.

The scene above is just how i work Robert, and not a guideline for everyone here. :) I can definitely agree, that for an animation, it would almost require to have the entire scene made inside Bryce. (If we dont count post production tools such as Combustion/Particle Illusion/After Effects) Now, if i would to spend another week on Traffic, i could achieve an almost identical result without the use of postwork. A few radial lights, illuminated neon signs, a couple of transmapped images, a few ships and a couple of letters with Elefont, and the result would be the same. Since i dont do animations, its not a problem for me, so instead of spending another week on these details, i can achieve it in a couple of hours or less in Photoshop. This way of work suits me perfectly, just as you prefer to do everything directly in Vue. :) Btw, Why do everyone think im working for DAZ? Theyve commissioned me to create a scene, thats it.

I always admired your imagination and creativity Rudolf ! And you are perfectly right that postwork is of great help for illustration purposes. Maybe I should use it more often :-) It was a pleasure to discuss with you about pros & cons of Vue-Bryce. Now let's go back to work - rendering is more fun than debating which software is the the best one. Who knows, maybe one day I will switch to Bryce 10 ;-)) (or we both switch to Cinema) Future is unknown...

Just to interject a few points of my own here. The most extensive postwork in any of my bryce images was to composite several bryce renders with hand painted masks. The typical is minor mesh fixes on poser exported meshes and perhaps a slight colour/contrast tweak. The bryce interface worked well for me, I must admit. I do however agree with the wish for an object manager (a feature I like very much in Cinmea4D) I still love bryces terrains and am starting to play with their export. (works quite well so far).

One thing that Bryce will always have on Vue are the procedural textures/landscapes by Eric Wenger and Ken Musgrave(Doc Mojo). Doc (literally) wrote the book on procedural fractals and Eric is the father of all landscape apps like Bryce and Vue. Even now, 8 years later, some of Eric's noises are not even duplicated in high end texture engines like Mental Ray. The far superior quality of the Bryce textures is quite clear to me when comparing the Bryce and Vue images posted above. Bryce5 also works on any PC from Win95 to XP Pro and Mac OS9.1 to OSX10.3 (and it hasn't been updated in 2 years!). It will also work with any video card, except truly ancient ones. Can Vue say the same? Bryce also includes both the Mac and PC versions, E-on charges full price for both. The Mac Vue demos (I've tried 3 now) have failed to work for more then about 10 minutes on any of my Macs. All those features don't mean much if it doesn't work. DAZ also offers a 30 day, unconditional money back guarantee. Best; Dan

Must we always have these fights? I have both products and love them both. I totally respect that somebody likes an interface more than another. I happen to be happy with both - but I don't like bashing: Dan, I recommend you check the latest version of Vue. The new material thingy blows Wenger and Muszgrave together out of the sky! I got my Vue on a hybrid CD, so I don't know where you got that info that you need to pay twice to have Mac and PC? And yes, Vue works fine on my comp - and so does Bryce.

I've got no beef with you petshoo or most Vue users. But it's really annoying for someone to post "Vue rules the 3D World" in a Bryce Forum. Actually, I call it just plain rude. But being rude in return is not the answer either. So I'll apologize for that. You're certainly entitled to think Vue noises are better - since I can only go by the Vue images posted and the reputation of these two guys, I still stand by what I said. I'm sure you'd know if it was a hybrid CD - Vue's Store page seems to indicate otherwise. As I said, I haven't been able to get the Vue demos to work on my Mac machine and I don't buy apps that I don't know will work. I'm glad your Mac version works on your machine. But I've never has any version of Bryce not work on any machine or OS. And as DAZ moves forward (hopefully) with Bryce development these Vue/Poser vs Bryce/D|S fights are probably just going to get a lot worse. Thanks for your response; Dan

It is beyond compare. Comparing the images in posts #23 and #24 I...uhmmm...errrr...I have to say that..... No, I can't say it.

roch i find your work amazing. i even like the prepost better as it isnt so cluthered and leaves room to the imagination