Attached Link: http://www.ryan-spaulding.com/microstationviz

Hey guys,

A bit of a change from the griping about e-on's service. I'm looking into Vue 5, but it is imperative that I know a few things for my job.

1. How does Vue5Infinite deal with importing of objects to scale? I build everything in MicroStation, to true scale, because I like how precise it is and I can save out to a DWG. Is there some workflow or scale to Vue5Infinite for me to change to get it all to work right?

2. Here's the major issue. I have yet to see any Vue images rendered large. For my job, we often need to make images at about 4500 lines (36" at 125dpi). How is the image quality for anyone who rendered a large image out?

Any chance I'm somehow missing a good Vue gallery to look at? Just an FYI, I work in the architecture viz sector of 3d and am looking for software that will produce high quality landscapes to surround the buildings. I'm sick of 2d bitmaps and RPCs.

Message edited on: 08/07/2005 13:23

Man, it's seriously bothering me that no one at any of 3 seperate boards bothers to answer my questions. :( Does no one import DWG's or render large images?

Hey Ryan, I do a lot of this type of work myself however I use SketchUp for doing the architectural models. I find that vue does a great job with the models I make not sure about MicroStation however, If you have a model made in MicroStation I would be glad to test it out for you. Thx, Vance

I use Microstation, but I've never been able to get 3d models from Microstation into any other program I use, or vice-versa. Could just be me, though.

I highly appreciate the responses. Below is a link to a typical model out of MicroStation. http://www.ryan-spaulding.com/gallina.dwg Thanks again! I look forward to hearing if there were problems.

Hi, Can't comment on MicroStation but I do regularly produce renders in V5I in the 2000 x 1500 pixel range on a machine with 512Mbytes of RAM without any particular problems. I've done larger images with Vue 4 in the past People tend to scale down their images for web galleries because the web is a low resolution media. Plus if you use a high res image it uses a lot more memory and makes it eaiser for some people to steal your work and pass it off as their own. Cheers Mark

I'll add this. I have found that many programs have their own scaling system. Which means, some imports into Vue can be huge, other can be tiny. But's it's no biggie to just size up or down depending on your needs. I'm in the process of rendering out large images & the couple test prints look fine. That said, keep in mind if the printer wants things converted to CMYK, you might have to do some color adjustments. In addition, another thing to keep in mind is the scene complexity. For large images, I find it easier and faster to render to disk. Also, if the scene is complex it might need to composited in separate layers in a paint program.

Ryan, I do import of Autocad (via .3ds export) models into Vue, here's some answers to your questions. 1) Vue has no real world units, but as long as you use the same units for different models and uncheck the "resize and center on import" option you should be fine. 2) As was stated before, for actual online galleries you won't find anything that large as there's no need (and usually not enough space, the theft thing, all that). Vue has no problems rendering large size renders like what you said you need (I typically am rendering 3500 though as most of our figures end up at 11x17 or slightly larger and we seldom need full 36" renderings). RAM is your biggest need for rendering large size and I'd recommend at least 2 GB just so you won't bump into any limitations when using the advanced lighting effects. The one kink you may have that was mentioned by someone else is that Microstation doesn't have a lot of export options per say that import directly into Vue. I'll check that dwg you linked to and save it down to dxf format (I have Microstation V8 here at work) and check it in Vue to see if it'll work, when I get the chance this afternoon. The other option is if you have access to Autocad you can open up the dwg and export it out from there to the .3ds format (which is what I've been doing for my visualization work). My gallery here doesn't have any of my visualization work but if you'd like I can send you some reduced down versions of some of my stuff so you get a feel for some of Vue's results. Feel free to IM me if you have more specific questions about the process and results. -Orion

Well that's not good, I just checked the dxf save out of the dwg (nice model overall by the way, though it looks to be under construction as there were some missing chunks in the roof when I opened up the dwg) and it gave me an error trying to import into Vue. The render is just a quick render from Vue showing the import of the .3ds file after I tried a quick export out from Autocad. Down and dirty, no changes, just verifying the import.

Wow. You guys are great!

That's odd it gave you an error. There must be something not exporting correctly.

To give you an idea of the final MicroStation model:

I dont have access to AutoCad. I can maybe find a way. Any other ideas for exporting?

Once again, you guys rock