I did...and I had to pinch me in the arm checking my awaken status! :-D Yepp, the mind-boggling EcoSys rocks; one the best thing ever happened to 3D world since Bryce. It is your wet 3D dream come true when you populate the whole world with grass, trees and stones and more with a few clicks; they solved the problem brilliantly; I could create steaming tropical forests after about 10 minutes! Somebody wrote here that instancing is an old stuff but I've never seen it in action before e-on implemented it in Vue...well, I've have some savings and I know what I'm going to buy... I'll never erase Bryce though; it's cool to have a...texture generator on your HD. :-))) (just kidding!)

Hey, I'm open minded but as I've said before posting this kind of stuff in a Bryce Forum is just plain rude! Nothing personal ya know; Dan

Haven't had time yet though I want to give the demo a go.

Judging from whats going on in the Vue forum here though, I wouldn't go and buy it just yet - I'd wait for eon to run out of ammo first (or feet) before I shelled out 600US (their most recent "updates" to V5I seem a bit... confused and damaging last I looked). If I had 600US spare, I'd also be looking at c4d as its in about the same price range.

Message edited on: 08/08/2005 07:27

Have to agree with Flak, I'd go for C4D over Vue, although vue has some nice features, thing is I own a few high end packages, yet Bryce always calls me back, no excuses, it just has it's own charm. I wish I could get some of the stuff from Bryce into C4D, Max or Maya, but there you go, mebbe in 6 it'll happen. But I've been a user of Bryce since version 2 and I think it'll always be a tool that is installed on my machine!

Vue 5I is a great great program but at 600,00$ it's a steal. And Eon is a jerk company. Look what they did with their Cornucopia Store. It's a shame to do that to their customers. Yeah I prefer Cinema4D or Carrara for that non modelling software. But it's well done.

Agreed, C4D (solid proven prog) would be where my money would be best spent. (if I had any) ;)

Hopefully by the end of the year, e-on will have Vue Fusion which will be a plug-in for Cinema4D. You will then have the best of both worlds, ecosystems and C4D's new SKY. All in all, Bryce will stay on my hard drive and in my heart.

Heresy!

We can wait to bryce 6 or 7, Bryce has had some years sttoped, vue not. I try vue demo and it is great, but 600$....

Well look at this. If I had 600$ for graphics programs would I buy Bryce, Silo, and Illustrator; Or buy Vue 5. That one feature is nice but when you look at the dollars and sense you get a different idea. Having lots of trees nice being able to model anything you want and do excellent textures and image edititng too nice. Maybe you are independantly wealthy and these things mean little to you so I understand for the rest of us we have to think before we part with our hard earned cash.

I have Vue 3 (the $15, comes-with-a-magazine-version..;), which does fine by me. I'm still trying to figure out Mojoworld 2 (same dealy..;) For $600, I'd expect near miracles..;) hey, if you have the money..;)

Sorry, I didn't want to be rude and start a quarrel; thanks for your opinions!

"Somebody wrote here that instancing is an old stuff but I've never seen it in action before e-on implemented it in Vue" Eh, whoever said it's "old stuff" was right. Object instancing, like what is used for Vue's ecosystem, has been used in most "high-end" apps for years. Vue might be the first mid-range app to use it, but it's not "new" technology.

The Eco-system looks nice, but as said above, C4D is a better buy if you dont have either, especially with the 64-bit version. If you already own C4D though, the Eco-system can be a nice addition to your tools. The Vue-fusion plugin sounded nice as well for starters. However, it still requires a license for V5I. Youll have to buy both the plugin and V5I. Plus youre forced to use Vues renderer instead of Cinemas, which i personally think is a huge minus. The quality of Cinemas renderer is something Vue cant match!

I agree with those who say to buy C4D for those money, but the small brother, Vue5, has a render engine not bad at all and costs slightly more than bryce. The material editor is also really interesting.

I started long time ago (eons if calculated in computer age) with an amiga 500 and Real 3d, a render engine with a modeler based on primitives and boolean operations. Bryce was the natural upgrade when I bought a WC-DOS computer, since it works with booleans and has a really intuitive interface.
Now I prefer to use an external editor, like that horrible freeware called W****, and use bryce for texturing and rendering. Now, thanks to a modern number crunching processor (p4@2.4ghz), I use to put a lot of lights and complex textures in the scene (hemidomes and so on) to fake radiosity and global illumination. It takes a lot of time to set up and fine tune a scene. With Vue5 you achieve this in few clicks.

Then, if you're looking for a good and cheap render engine Vue5 is sure your best choice.
Also Blender makes it for free, but I find it difficult to manage.
For more complex things and special effects (see orgasmatic enviroment editors) there are more expensive high end programs.
And our Bryce? I think it's more a faith question and, of course, the possibility to share your work with a wonderful communuty like this at renderosity. That's why I still love my Bryce.

Attached Link: http://www.newtek.com

That's W****3d! to you..;) Blender is right confusing; I mainly use it to do a precious few things that Wings can't do (yet). But whaddaya want for free?..;)

Tryed vue and uninstalled it after an hour and a lot of no pretty words. The thing crashed on my computer every time I tryed to do something. I hate buggy expensive programs. I'm not used to that with Bryce 5.1. Thank God.

Most Brycers want to model and animate too. That is what seperates us. Bryce is just a inexpensive quality renderer. If I had the money I would find the extra change and get Lightwave. Or I would buy a suite of useful programs like Silo and Z Brush. If Vue 5I comes down to normal speacial purpose landscape renderer price then I will think about it.

I agree with Dann-O. Myself, I've taken to modeling my entire scenes in Wings, then texturing and rendering in Bryce. It's much easier that way; even Bryce's terrains can be beat by Wings' modeling cababilities. Makes me wonder what could be done with 3DS Max! =) If I had the money, I'd forget both C4D and Vue and go for Maya. But, unfortunately, I don't have the money. =( I'll have to get it eventually for school, though.

Sounds a bit pricey! C4D or Maya for sure, the extra is obviously worth it in the long run;) I must fire up that demo of Vue though, who knows! Robert how the hell do you do terra in wings? I'm still trying to work the thing out you see;)

Terrain in Wings. use the grid extrude various faces in groups and out of groups smooth and then do a crumple action to make it more terrain like and smooth again. You would be surprized with the results.

Thanks Dann-O;) I'll have to give that a try then.

That V5I and Lightwave thing looks interesting, expensive though. I think I will wait until there are 64 bits versions out and I have enough ram that 64bits OS is a good idea.

If I had the scratch I would get the Lightwave deal there but I do not. Lightwave actually is my favorite top end program. The biggest drawback is all the bad things I have heard about the dongle they use for copy protection. But Vue 5I by itself is not something I would shell out that kind of money for. Remember too there are many great thigns about Bryce and we don't go trolling your boards talking about them. The shaders in Bryce are more varied and can do more. Volumetric materials are handled better. I use volumetrics in over half my pics. Great for fogs, nebula, rocks or just plain weirdenss. Vue is good overall for making realistic scenes but it seems that I have seen little that was truly out of the norm there seems to be no way to go to the surreal. Realism is fine but sometimes you want to make moutain ranges out of pudding.

Thanks Dann-O for your input. I was really on fire testing the Vue5I demo; I asked and waited millions of years for something like instancing in Bryce...Hope DAZ will implement it as soon as possible together with GI. You are right about the realism contra surrealism in Vue...it dowesn't inspire people the way as Bryce do.

I'm not a Brycer (hope you don't mind) but I like what people do with Bryce. Object instancing or Eco Systems is really old stuff, you can have it totally free with POV-Ray. With this in mind 600$ for me is really too much for this feature. I have Vue 5 Esprit (the smaller brother) because it is easier to use than POV-Ray. But unfortunately this version has a big memory management issue that E-on apparently can't resolve: even with 2 GB RAM Vue 5 Esprit crashes when you import more than just a few 3rd party objets, e.g. from Poser. And I do like the plants from RDNA and want to use them! I have not yet found a solution that really suits me, therefore I just wait. But C4D seems most promising at the moment.

Hm, the interesting thing is that I've probably never seen pics here in Rsity using instancing before Vue5I; I also remember now that some older progs (World Builder?) indeed used instancing. Animatek had a great landscaping prog. about 6-7 years ago; it had among other features like "wind", "waves on shore", "flowing water/waterfall" and other fantastic things; the water animations war outstanding. I believe Vue manages EcoSys very well (I'm in love with it) but yes, the price is just a pain, I'm not sure I can really pay so much...hope it will go down a bit. Lol, in one Vue5I demo scene I put 1.1 Billion polygons without crashing my laptop although I failed to populate an INFINITE plain...:-D ("out of memory" of course)

Vue 5 and Cinema 4D is completely different and you cant compare....for the C4D price are you adding the AR module to add radiosity to the renderer. Have you ever tried creating accurate terrain materials in C4D that can be adjusted for elevation, slope etc?...and it's not modal like Vue5i. Tried adding hundreds, if not thousands of fauna species to a Cinema scene?...I have and you'll need 4gig of ram and/or a lot of time to get anywhere close to what you want....don't even ask if you want camera blur, soft shadows etc... The list goes on. I love and use both softwares, but they are for different tasks. Just wish E-on would sort their update problems out though lol! Cheers

Cheers why can't compare Vue to C4D. First off we are telling you what we would rather have. I would rather have a really good recliner. What difference does it make. Many Brycers want to model things and animate things more than render lots of trees. Many Brycers use bryce as a modeler too and beleive it or not there are some rather sophisticated models made in Bryce.Look in Bambams gallery that is all Bryce modeling. So because we are approaching from that direction we want more of it. Carrera has some great terrain features so that would be a good alternative. Bryce is more than just a landscape program. It is also a modeler too. It is very limiting to only use something for what others tell you it is for. I make terrains in Wings from time to time. I made creatures in Bryce. Sometimes you have to look at a set of tools a different way and see whole new ways of doing things. One of the things I like about the Bryce community is that they are very creative at problem solving and find unique ways to solve problems.

You can't compare Vue with Cinema...Vue is mainly a landscape generation software. By all means compare Vue with Bryce, World Builder etc and compare Cinema with Lightwave, Maya etc. I agree - I think Vue (or Bryce) and Cinema compliment each other together. Try doing soft IK in Vue (or Bryce)...or particle affects, NURBS modelling, even point editing...you can't....well you could fake it if you have a lot of time to spare and no life. They were built to accomplish different tasks. It's like comparing chalk and cheese...yes, you can eat chalk, but it tasts shit...the same as trying to write with cheese...it gets everywhere. Maybe I am standing from a commercial viewpoint and it's wrong , butI feel one is meant for one job and the other one for another job and where and when in the pipeline you render the combined efforts from both softwares is the only decision....be it in Vue or Cinema. I do agree Dann-O...it isn't good to be limited...but I would rather not pull the hair from my head trying to do soft IK, box modelling etc in Vue or Bryce ;) Cheers