can someone PLEASE tell me if it's possible or how it's possible to re-sise the camera in Vue?? in lightwave i can change the relative size of the camera by increasing the grid size of the scene. is it possible to do something similar in vue? for example, i want to be able to bring the camera really close to a terrain, but i don't want to have to go making everything super-big so the camera will look super-small. is there a way to just... make the camera smaller? am i making any sense?

You make sense, yes. And the answer in my knowledge is "no". Not possible. But isn't it really the same? To make the camera smaller or the rest bigger is the same in my eyes (beside that camera scaling is probably quicker, i agree). Only a different way to do it. If you go close to a terrain, use a procedural terrain, then you don't have to worry about resolution!

well it's basically what you said; it's far easier to scale the camera than to scale every single item in your scene i have another question now.... how do i stop an ecosystem from creating instances of trees, rocks etc EVERYWHERE on the terrain? is it possible to mark some areas as needing to be left untouched? i've been trying to do that for the last hour and a bit with no success... maybe i should consult a manual or something... shudders at the thought

Yeah, there is. One way is to put planes (should be invisible) on the terrain where you don't want trees, and that will activate the "decay near foreign objects" part of the ecosystem.

Use a distribution map. Check out the Backroom, in the materials tips section. Under ecosystems, theres one called 'Complex Eco-systems' that should cover what you want to achieve. The Backroom link is at the top of this page.

wabe, when i first heard of procedural terrains in vue i was super-excited. i'm not so excited now though i'm running a machine with a dual core 64bit athlon 3800+, the sexy nvidia geforce 7800GT and a gig of ram and procedural terrains STILL cause my machine a great deal of grief. i prefer working with an inferior, normal terrain and be able to move it around without it going all glitchy and stuff :p

No, I actually like it, Rays. You're right about the texture, but who says there can't be that kind of plant underwater?

well, the ground texture looks more like clay than like soil and i doubt that clay would be fertile enough to support that vegetation. but then again... who says it has to be 100% realistic eh? ;)

Realism is boring anyway. For that i go out with my camera! Terrains. What you always could do is work with a standard terrain and switch to procedural when all is done! The best of two worlds so to say.

You can change the texture for the eco on the general tab. You can also make it procedural by double clicking the terrain & using the drop down to switch over, you will have to re-populate the eco afterwards though. My machine is 266ghz, 1gb ram & I just posted a huge procedural with large ecosytem with global illumination. 1024 size render in 3hrs or so. The first attempt was 37hrs & 55% so I went back & changed the GI quality to -1, this then rendered in the 3hrs. Hope that helps.

I think this is a nice picture. Just fix the rest and it will be fantastic!

i've been trying to change the map thing for Variable Density, but it only accepts *.fnc files and i haven't got the slightest clue how to create those i could always take a *.jpg and rename it to an *.fnc file but i somehow doubt it would work :p

the changing-to-procedural-before-rendering idea is a good one, i have to say. will definitely keep in mind for the future. thanks! :)

Nope, this would not work. What you must do is to edit the function (fnc) and add there a bitmap (jpg) as map. Very easy if you know how - i have to say :-))))

oh... umm... how do i edit the function then? :p

lol - sorry, i couldn't resist the little joke. Ok, you enter the material editor - ecosystem. Go to the density tab. There in the middle you see a sphere, should be gray. On the upper left corner of this sphere you click on "variable density". Now you do a right click onto the sphere and tell the system "edit function". There you see to the left 4 groups of icons. You click onto the second of the third group (too much math???) from above. To the lower left corner there now appears a field saying "texture map node". In the right field you have a small little arrow in the lower left corner. There you select the image you want to use! Keep in mind - black is "no material", white is "material" here. But you can invert the image in the upper right corner. Now - listen carefully - here comes the final trick! You exit the function editor. Right beside the sphere with the now mapped image you see a little graph - the filter. You have to edit that too. Or load (for the beginning) a predefinded one. I used from the collection "Saturation" the one "Saturation 50/80%" Gives you an idea how the filter should look like - you of course can create one yourself. Now, don't forget to hit the population button and be happy!

Rays of light, posted a brief reply on the picture as to it's origins. 84,000 odd trees. Wabe posted a 100,000 tree pic the day the program launched & that was the general inspiration for the piece. We've been here years & have seen Vue really make big strides. He is a font of knowledge when it comes to VUE. My gallery only starts recently because I deleted the previous one in a fit of pique. DOH.

Increasing the size of things is not an option either for what you want. The atmospheric effects kick in way more because the distance changes and you would have to tweak everything to get it the way you want. I agree that a small camera would make sense. and I would love to have it too

that's very true kylara... maybe it's something they could take care of via an update or something? anyway, i set this scene to render at 1280x1024 with global illumination this morning, about 10 hours ago and the estimated time is STILL rising. it's up to 20hrs+ now and still going... i wonder how many days it'll really take :p

... an hour and a half or so later and it's at 21hrs and 33 minutes. that's what i get for wanting murky, mildly reflective water with a high refraction index WITH bumps on the water surface :p

Infinite is rendering from bottom up. The calculation of the remaining time is always based on the last scanline that was proceeded (or the last couple of...). Normally at the top of an image there is sky so you can have the hope that it becomes much faster than expected later. In Vue 4 it was vice versa - 4 rendered from top to bottom and therefore the remaining time vecame longer and longer because it comes to the more difficult parts of the image later. When you think about, there are not many ways to estimate the remaining time really. Especially when you don't want to use a lot of processor time for this and therefore don't want to make difficult calculations. I remember times of Bryce when there was no information about remaining time. I had once an image that rendered three weeks! I waited and waited. And waited and waited.

ahaha that sure brings back memories... good old bryce. i know what you mean about the estimate. the problem is, as you can see from the smaller render further up in this thread, that about 2/3s of the image are taken up by water and that's what's making the estimate go through the roof. i was discussing this with my sister just before actually, how there isn't a single graphics app i know of which can give you an accurate estimate, as paradoxical as that may sound. of course, with time and experience, you come to develop a 6th sense as to how long it'll take to render. with bryce for example, i knew that as soon as i added a volumetric light in the scene which casted a shadow, we were talking for hours of rendering. kinda makes you feel all cool and knowledgeable when you can do estimates like that ;) i'm estimating my render will finish sometime around noon tomorrow, so another 14 hours or so, even though it says 21. anyway, i'll stop stealing CPU resources from it by having the browser open and active and let it get back to work :)

Brings up an idea to me. The preview. There we have a complete rendering so to say. Maybe the time the preview needs could be taken for the render estimation? The idea came into my mind because the only way to estimate more accurate is to "pre-render" the image in a low format first and then multiply that with some factors (pixel size, anti-aliasing quality etc etc). I can imagine, it could be possible.

Rendertime is easily estimated... Just divide the size of your image to render by x and render it at the settings you want. Then multiply the true time by x^2 and you have an almost 100% good estimate. So let's say you would want a render of 800 x 600. We make x=10... So render it at 80 x 60. If it takes 2 minutes then the real time will be 2*10^2=200 minutes. If you think 80 x 60 is already too long to wait then make x=20 so the pictogram you're rendering is 40 x 30...

and that works? i guess i can't see why it wouldn't. ah, the wonderful things you learn when you mingle with people :D

It is an estimate of course. Remember, anti-aliasing that looks for surrounding pixles will have to deal with different pixels when the resolution is higher. But indeed, as estimate it should work.

Yup it is an estimate... therefore the smaller you go, the more inaccurate it will be. However, doing it like this almost always gives me the estimate within a few minutes (with over hours of rendering).

I agree - the only problem is mostly that i want the image, "whatever it costs".

normally when a render is taking this long (yup, it's still going) i just hit cancel and adjust my settings to try and reduce the render time, but since i'm only just starting to play around with vue, i thought i'd see how much of a difference Global Illumination will make. with my luck, it'll look exactly the same as the non-GI version which takes 3-4 hours to render instead of 24hrs to get to 48% :p

There was once a VERY interesting comparison at CGTalk, e-on forum. By any reason i am too stupid to find it again but maybe you can go and try to find that. Not too much difference really between the render modes. But of course, this depends heavily what image type you try to render.

well i would suspect that if i was rendering a scene of a room with a single light source coming through a window, it would make a huge difference if radiosity was enabled than if it was not. for a pond with plants around it though i somehow doubt that global illumination will make much of a difference. there IS one good thing about it though. the resume render option!! it is BRILLIANT! it means i can switch the computer off at night so i can sleep without a headache AND without losing the day's progress! that alone is enough to make anyone fall in love with vue ;)

Amen!

well, the render FINALLY finished. it took just under 40 hours and can be found in my gallery here: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1044165&Start=1&Artist=RaysOfLight&ByArtist=Yes for the sake of comparison, here's a scaled down version of the Global Illumination version (40 hours) against a non-GI version (40 minutes!). they were both rendered at 1280 x 1024. GI version had custom render settings (i disabled some options which didn't apply to the image) and the non-GI was rendered with Ultra settings. it looks a lot better, but i don't know if the extra 39 hours and 20 minutes were really worth it. I could probably produce that difference in 10-20 minutes in photoshop

I don't think you can easily produce that in PS... The GI version looks MUCH better in my opinion *way more depth in the water for instance). I would simply accept the rendertime and let it render in a few nights. I'm pretty sure you too will have spare time in wich you don't make use of the the computer. Use it anyway, it's worth it! (cool render btw)