I need to execute an animation project in the next 6 weeks that is perfect for Vue/Mover/Poser. In that time frame, it does not look like I will have Vue5Pro. So, should I go with Vue4Pro or the current Vue5Esprit?

I really want the radiosity and global illumination and some other features found in Vue5Esprit. But I don't want to render in Vue5Esprit on a 3-5 cow renderfarm and have it bog down because it is not "Pro". I am being pushed into this fear by e-On's statement:

"Both Vue Esprit and Vue Professional will produce very high quality renders. The difference between the two products is not in the quality of the output, but rather in the time that it takes to achieve the desired level of quality, the control that you have over your creation, and the way the product fits into your existing toolkit. You can get the same picture quality from Esprit as from Professional (in the same generation), but it'll take you longer to create the picture, and longer to render it: Vue Professional is packed full of options to reduce production times. It's also full of features designed to improve your overall productivity. If you are interested in animation, then Vue Professional is probably the way to go."

Can anyone attest to the fact that Vue5Esprit is functional for a medium-ambitious animation project as is, in association with Poser and Mover, rendering on a 3-5 node farm?

Thank you,
::::: Opera :::::

I would definitely NOT use radiosity in an animation project. Therefore if animation is your need I would buy Vue4Pro while it's on offer and then upgrade to Pro5 when it is out.

Rodluc 2001 has created a radiosity faking python app that works with VuePro 4. Depending on what you set it for (and you are talking about 2 buttons and a slider for controls), it creates the lighting cluster you need to get the basic effect. So you can balance render time vs. lighting accuracy.

Thanks for those two insights. I am following up looking into Rodluc's item. Orio, may I ask you to elaborate just a little bit more? Are you against radiosity function in animation because of the render time? You think it does not do any good or improve appearance? Or? Also, leaving radiosity aside, can you briefly give the other reasons you recommend 4Pro over 5? Thank you, ::::: Opera :::::

Yes Operaguy, it's precisely the render times that do not indicate radiosity as a viable solution for animations. Unless you have a renderfarm of say 16 networked computer, I would give this idea up. As for recommending Vue4Pro over Esprit5, well, I don't always do, I just did in your case because it seems that you are going to need more "pro" features than the usual Vue user. As a program for rendering stills or simple animations, Esprit 5 is a terrific value. It can give renders of quality that is comparable to software costing 3 or 4 times as much. This is usually what most people need and in that case, Esprit 5 is a fantastic value for the money. Then there are some people with more ambitious projects, and in this case, I would recommend Pro because of the more available features, like the plant editor or the lighting capabilities. it's true that currently Esprit 5 has some things that Pro4 doesn't have, but it won't last long, and if it's a long-term investment that you are going to make, then investing in Pro seems the most logical thing to do for the kind of project that you have in mind.

Orio, Thanks for answering in detail. I am leaning towards Vue4Pro at this time. I intend to be executing on a five node renderfarm. However, I don't know my seconds-per-frame budget yet, and I may have to add some nodes. I am leaning to 4pro because apparently the advanced users in the Vue community have developed tricks with 4 to emulate advanced lighting and other photo-realistic qualities. I also sense that 4Pro has been in use for a while whereas 5Esprit is so new it is likely in the "users are completing the shakedown" period! What I might do at this point is focus on producing the animation itself and render a small format version, perhaps 480 x 270 or even a little smaller. This will buy me time with the client. Then, when 5Pro comes out and gets stable, I will upgrade and re-render at DVD highest quality taking advantage of some of the radiosity features here and there for critical scenes. I can't discuss the content of this project ahead of time, but I will be able to show results afterwards. ::::: Opera :::::

v5 pro teaser pt 2 :)

aparently v5pro finaly will allow us to import video for alphaplanes and textures, please note that it isnt officialy announced but steven made a post in the e.on user forum that hinted @ e.on implementing that feature in v5 pro and by god i hope its true :)

Message edited on: 11/20/2004 06:07

Oh My. That would be -so- cool... Video screens.... Multi level animations... Interiors with window boxes and spots for higher interior detail.... If the Python implementation has been fixed in 5, maybe we could all gang up on Wierd Juice Software. Metaform is a rather nice little metablob effects generator for Poser 5. If they could get it to work in Pro 5, there's your flowing water...fountains...fire and smoke... Ghu, I wish we had a Python Guru like Ockham here... Scripting effects like rain and snow might be possible with the metablobs, now.

Opera; Yeah, Vue 5 is very much in the real world shake down mode. I got it mainly to experiment with the new lighting engine, and get a feel for the time penalties I'm looking at in using them. VuePro is definitely what I would recommend for animation purposes. It just does more... If you want an idea of what Vue 5 looks like in animation, hop over to Renderotica.com It's a free register site (and very much adult content). In the animation gallery, I have a fragment of a much larger animation that got munched by a power transient (next on the 'To Buy' list; battery backups for the entire garden), and put it up just as a show off of the new lighting capabilities. The quickie is in DivX-5, less than 300 frames, and uses Vue 5's Global Illumination and IBL mapped to the skydome (although not affecting the atmosphere); the image used was a tile.bmp in the Vue directory (a brick wall tile, so it was dark and complex). It was part of a 900 frame (648x486@30fps), and with the 5 node garden I have, it took somewhere in the region of 66hrs to render (the clip shown took 16hrs and a fraction). I'm probably going to start a render with the same scene using the Global Ambience setting this weekend, to get an idea of the render time with that lower setting...

mm dale that would be quite nice, lets see if its better implemented in v5pro first and if it is we should get the entire vue community to gang up on Wierd Juice Software :)

dale, 16 hrs for 300 frames of 648x486. is that 16 hrs for EACH cow, or cummulatvie 16 hrs adding up all cow duration? the difference is 3.2 min per frame vs 16 min per frame. ::::: Opera :::::

That was a 16 hour rendertime with 5 cows running. I should also be a little more precise in my settings; Environment mapping. Global Illumination. Volumetric sunlight enabled Image based Lighting, mapped to skydome and environment, but not mapped to the sky (the brick tile texture made the cloud layers look funky) Final quality setting. The only things I could have twisted higher was going to full Global Radiosity and Broadcast mode, with motion blur and final pass optimization enabled. I won't even =consider= HDRI for animating. Not without a 50 node renderfarm, at least. 16 min per frame is about what it averaged, give or take 5 minutes (the Athlon 64-3000 could chew through almost 2 frames before the 2500+ finished one). I'll have a better idea what is going on when I start the run using the global ambience, but I suspect part of the time was the fact that the image used in the IBL was color, and had quite a few color values in it. This was a torture run; now I have a benchmark to pull back from and find the happy medium....

Whoa. Started the second test. The changes in lighting I made were a shift to global amibience, and ignoring the sky in the image based lighting. According to HyperVue, the 900 frame animation should be done in slightly over 16 hours. What kind of differences in image quality remains to be seen, but that is what I would call a significant amount of time...

Wow. Big difference there. Wonder how it will compromise quality. Let's not forget, animation is much more forgiving to certain abnormalities in a render than still images are. What would be blaringly apparant in a still might not be noticable in animation. So basically, you can get away with a little more... providing you're not rendering for high quality DV output.

You have no idea how much I am already counting on the point, maxx, for my project! Th stop frame(s) with a close up has to be killer, but characters in motion...less stress shall be applied. It is beginning to look like I will have a budget of 2-4 min per frame. ::::: Opera :::::

"It is beginning to look like I will have a budget of 2-4 min per frame." Well, that sounds like a workable budget, depending of course on what's required of the scene. Think about what you can and absolutely can not do in post too. Much of the time, video post is the answer to shaving down rendertimes even more... the more you can get done in a video FX compositor/editor, the less you have to do for the render, and the more time you save (usually). It can really help your budget tremendously. What do you use for post? Something like AfterEffects or Combustion can really be useful tools for "faking" a lot of things you might normally try to do in the render, and the results are just as good, if not better.

Hmmmm.... Dropping to Global Ambience and telling Vue 5 to ignore mapping to the sky layers makes a wee bit of a difference... The 900 frame rendertime was 9hr 33" 17" total. It comes out to a 2.86meg DivX 5 file. I did bump the sunlight up to a visble amount, to throw some shadows on things. The undersides of leaves and clouds look dark; not sure if it is the lightmapping or the map being lit from. The overall effect seems just a touch grainier; but if there were camera motion, I doubt you would notice it.

would you mind letting us see the "masterpiece" dale :) big difference as you said in render time.

Well... I can E-mail the clip to people if they want, and there service can handle it; it's too big to put up at Rotica, and it -so- violates the TOS here (which in itself makes it a temptation under some circumstances, but I'm trying to be a good doobie...). I don't have enough content to have a website as of yet (hopefully one day...)... Or I can send a frame from each test run, for comparison's sake... Now that that test is over, time to try a scene with Mobius's Dystopia city blocks...

how big is the file, and if you ever need to host anything just give me a shout and ill host it for you, plenty of servers and bandwith where im coming from :)

Max to Operaguy: >> What do you use for post? Something like AfterEffects or Combustion can really be useful tools for "faking" a lot of things you might normally try to do in the render, and the results are just as good, if not better. << I have not gotten that far yet. (I use a little known and fantastic app for single-frame editing called Canvas by Deneba.) You make a good point about faking things. For one thing...painted backdrops and layered backdrops and you can import quicktime footage into Poser backgrounds (i bet you can do the same in Vue) and when things get really serious I will have to attack professional animation post. I've already discovered the trick of taking a freeze frame of background and not-speaking-or-moving-now character and using that as a backdrop for a one-character animation in front of it. This has its limits, but useful. Thanks for waking me up on that, Max. ::::: Opera :::::