So, some of you have Vue 5 for some time now what are your impressions about it?

I love it :)

So far not much done, I love the HDRi but it for big scenes it probably takes way too much time. Great for object portraits. Do like the detection of memory problems.

I have Vue 4 and Vue Pro and enjoyed both of those versions (after some of the intial issues were fixed). So I figure my view point would be worthwhile to some of you out there. Please note that I mainly render stills so I'm not sure about any pros or cons as regards Vue 5 and animation. I love a lot of the updates that have been made in Vue 5 and have not gone back to Pro except once. Vue Pro has a feature that allows you to update the Vue Pro file if a base Poser file has been updated. This is a great feature and did not make it into Vue 5.

The new render modes are great (just see some of Veritas's post for info on that. The changes to the editors are excellent.

Stability is good. I would say that the initial release of Vue 5 is far better than the initial releases of Vue 4 or Vue Pro. I had some significant problems with both of those releases. (I may have just gotten lucky this time around as some people did not experience the problems that I had with the previous releases. With a sample size of 1 - it is hard to drawn generic conclusions about stability.)

My biggest grip about Vue 5 and Vue 5 Pro is that I'm not sure what is going to be in the Pro version. I would have liked to have all of that info when I purchased . . . However, I am so pleased with Vue 5 that I'm probably not going to grumble much if I break down and buy 5 Pro also.

Message edited on: 10/31/2004 17:11

Message edited on: 10/31/2004 17:16

I have Vue 4 Pro and sidegrade to Vue 5. I am curious what Vue 5 Pro will have also. I assume besides animation, it allows to create content better and also exporting to higher end 3d applications. I have Lightwave 3d. I also believe network rendering is also benifits. I would be curious in the differences..

I am too looking forward to the specs of Vue5 Pro...that will be my Xmas present this year :). Can't wait for them to come out!

I have Vue4, VuePro and now Vue5. While there are features in VuePro that are wonderful (plant editor, ability to replace objects - only a few that come to mind), the new features of Vue5 have won me over. The material and atmosphere editors are awesome, the new lighting features are incredible, and I love that I can use VuePro modified/created plants. One feature I adore is the ability to stop a render (stills) and pick it up again another day. This fits my workstyle and does away with my need for rendercows. It's feature packed and I'm still reading the manual to get it all.

I would hope that Vue 5 Pro has something signficant to add to programs.. One thing that is good about this side grade stuff. Is that I can have Vue 4 Pro on one machine and Vue 5 on another. This has advantage over being able to work on something while one is rendering something. Its also nice to have one up with scene used for reference while working on another. My main setup has has a 3.2Ghz and 2.6 P4's side by side... I also have a 2.8 and 2.26 at home for other things.. for Mojoworld - its great - for Vue and Lightwave - just render nodes. I will also likely be getting Vue 5 Pro. I really likely the lighting enhancments in Vue 5. The tutorials on e-on site are nice.. I still learning this stuff and have a long ways to go. My goal is one day build sci-fi scenes but I believe that will envolved a lot of Lightwave 3d modelling.. I using 8.01 which is the latest.

On a side note, I under stand legal issues with these graphics programs.. for me I perfer Lightwave and World Contruction Set 6's ( not installed and don't use ) method with dongle. This allows me to move it to another machine, Deep Paint 3d's internet license is alright, but hassle if machine crashes. I waiting on Lightwave 8 upgrade for it - before I use it again.

the light features are impressive... you can't love my images... but take a look a the "portico" and "vicolo" : they use radiosity and big resolution blurred resampled at 800x600... (of course a lot of hours of rendering...)

I just love Vue 5. It is much better then Vue 4 and I'm was already very happy with that one. Here are some of my reasons why I do love Vue 5 and prefer it over Vue 4:

[1] Poser impport has been improved a lot (even though the animated pz3 import is being worked on still). One can now select and change a poser texture by it's name instead of looking for the object that uses it. Materials are being picked in a pop up browser, so much more convenient. It make changing materials on poser files, so much easier.

[2] Volumetric lights have been improved. Much smoother and better then in Vue 4. A loaded Vue 4 scene looks so much nicer when rendered in Vue 5.

[3] Solidgrowth 3, finally!

[4] 3D text, very usefull. When using a paper or blackboard with text on it for exapmle, I used to create textures mapped on to the object in Vue 4. Such a hassle, especially in getting the text on the desired place. No more of that, just type and edit text in Vue 5 and place the text object on top of the desired object.

[5] Metablobs, missed those from my Bryce 5 days..... no more.

[6] Procedural terrains. When using the same standard terrain and procedural terrain, with exactly the same materials, the 2 look like a different terrain altogether. Especially when using larger terrains, this looks so much better.

[7] Parametric mapping, great addition to the way textures map unto the object. Also the new material and function editors are cool, but I haven't really used those for any serious work yet.

[8] Post-Processing. What a wonderful addition, don't recall ever seeing that in a 3D application I've used before.

[9] Png support, needed and requested that in past a couple of times and now it's finally there.

You will notice that HDRI, GI and Radiosity are missing in my list, simply because I'm not using those at all. They do not add anything to Vue 5 for me at all. My project usually consist of 25 to 50 rendered images and that a project takes me about a week to render. That's long enough for me, don't even want to know how much longer it would take when using all of these fancy new rendering features.... Of course I played with them, but for me they're not adding anything at all to my projects ( except for a lot of time used to finish the project ). I'm very happy with Vue 4's rendering engine already and that one has been improved too in Vue 5, so now I'm very happy with it. I'll leave all of the fancy stuff to someone else.

Of course this small review wouldn't be complete without mentioning Vue 5 major backdraw: it's awefully memory and system resource hungry! It can't handle a number of my larger Vue 4 projects at all, without giving me memory related errors and crashes. Even though E-On states that 256Mdb RAM is the minimum and 512Mb RAM is recommended, I feel sorry for someone trying to work with this application with 256Mb RAM only.... Actually the manual states that 512Mb RAM is a good start. From personal experience I must say that even 512Mb isn't enough at all, especially when working on larger scenes or scenes with Poser pz3's in it. You definitely want more physical memory then.

To conclude, Vue 4 is great, Vue 5 is even better. Vue 5 feels and works even better then Vue 4 and with the major and little improvements in it, it's really worth having.

Message edited on: 11/01/2004 03:34

"You will notice that HDRI, GI and Radiosity are missing in my list, simply because I'm not using those at all. They do not add anything to Vue 5 for me at all" well Costaud, you can see so different opinions... well for me new light features are the most important improve ! and are minor all the other ailkema's points :) wolrd is nice 'coz is different !! bye

In my opinion, HDRi GI and Radiosity is signicant improvement - sign of real professsional applications and this is lower end version of Vue. Very nice indeed.

I'm waiting until that first service release, to hopefully get the MoverRenderCow issues fixed so I can see how things go with animations. What I've seen in the stills I've done and others have done is impressive, though.... Now if only 5Pro has all the light goodness and a particle based weather system....or talk E-on and CL into exposing the windforce controls to Python...a script to synch the wind effects generation between VuePro and P5... Le Sigh...

I've had Vue 5 for a couple of weeks now and was one of the beta testers for it, so far my favorite and by far the most useful new features are the metablobs (come on, organic modeling!! this is HUGE!!) and the new procedural terrains/textures combination. The Global Illumination and Radiosity features are beautiful but time consuming to say the least, and depending on the scene make very little difference unless you switch back and forth between the two to compare (mostly seems to make the shadowed areas fade into total black more realistically). Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the option is there if I need/want it but for most of my larger outdoor scenes the polygon count and detail are going to make it almost impossible to justify. For now I'm mostly sticking with Global Ambiance, which adds in some of the effect of GI and Radiosity without the huge render time jolt of the higher settings. I've not gotten into HDRI renders at all yet and probably won't until I have a chance to make some decent panoramic photos to really take advantage of it. The render engine is much improved as well (especially if you ignore Vue Pro and consider that Vue 5 is an upgrade to the old Vue 4 Esprit line) and I'm getting ready to post my first new render (meaning not a vue 4 scene re-rendered in 5) within the next couple of days. The last thing I'll mention that right now seems like an annoyance but I can already see will have huge benefits, is the redesigned function editor, which seems to have a lot more options for the advanced user than Vue 4's did. Overall This is a superb upgrade from Vue 4 Esprit but Pro owners will definately want to wait out a few months for Vue 5 Pro which should be incredible.

hi bonnyclump, for me the real buggy one is vuepro 4, my vue d'esprit 4 crash sometime and vue esprit 5 never crashed after hundreds hours of rendering... maybe i'm lucky or you very unlucky....

Many thanks to all of you for great informations.

I have not been able to use it... because so far, every single time I've tried to create a procedural terrain and use the function editor, Vue's crashed. :(

I was able to create procedural terrain but when I try to put procedural texture on texture for object and Vue was very slow. I was surprise it allowed it but I was able to pick and load it.

I'm not really sure, I've only had Vue crash once on me when using procedural terrains and that was when I was trying to do too many things at once in the terrain editor. Haven't had any problems applying textures to them but I would imagine it would slow down a bit since it has to add nodes to the terrain itself in order to apply the procedural texture correctly.