[beginneth essay]

I've recently been playing with V5i and its been an interesting learning experience.

Featurewise, V5i has a few very nice things - mainly ecosystems and the lighting are the things I've looked at so far. Out of the box plants are pretty good too. You should go and have a look at garyandcatherine's more recent gallery posts where they are using V5i for sorts of images that I think are similar in style/content to some of your work to get a good "relevant to you" sort of feel for it.

People often say that Vue's renderer is faster - but I think this is mainly due to the Vue renderer having a pile of quality options whereas bryces renderer is just full raytracer all the time (hence slow as). What this means is that if you have a simple scene that doesn't need full raytracing to render, then in Vue you can choose a render option that won't use as much raytracing, and hence it renders quite fast. However, once you try and smooth out those soft shadows so they're no longer grainy as hell, then you need to really dial up those Vue settings and so it slows down a lot (whether its as slow or slower than bryce for the same output image quality, I'm not sure, but it sure slows down an aweful lot with the quality sliders being pushed up a bit).

Lighting - being able to click a single button to get some form of GI is really nice.

Vue's poser integration thing... Now that bryce 5.5 has DS integrated (err.... more or less), the poser compatibility thing is more even between the two than it was (but you're on a mac, so that may remove the 5.5 from the discussion), unless you're doing animations, in which case V5i wins. Since you've got P6, that probably tilts that more in favour of V5i as well. Vue's main interface window (the one where you are building your sceen) seems a fair bit slower than bryce to update/respond - i.e. when Vue is in a single view (not the quad view it can do) with the same wire mesh appearance of the same object, bryce sure seems much quicker to update the view. V5i crashes far more often than bryce 5 on my system (2GB ram 3.2GHz HT P4). In the last three months of heavy bryce usage, I've had maybe 1 crash. V5i has been installed/uninstalled about 6 times in that same period and has had maybe 20 crashes while being used a lot less. The things where V5i has gone awry in my case has been in the simple basics (i.e. simple scene renders, importing large but not overly complex non-textured models...) - probably what some people have said about B5.5. I haven't yet tried a big scene in V5i to really put it under the hammer though - whether these crashes are a result of me doing things wrong or what, I'm not sure. To be fair though, E-on are working on the stability and bugs that inhabit V5i pretty diligently (they are up to patch 9 now in about 10-11 months since release I think) and it seems a lot more stable than what it was (though, every so often new issues seem to arise with a new update patch).

There's also a few other things I've run into in Vue that have sort of made me sit back and go "Uh-oh", though these are more than likely just because the programs do things differently and I'm not used to the Vue way.

Example Uh-oh - tried to render 4000x3000pixel image (bryce does this size render pretty easily on my system) to screen of a low-poly ecosystem on a 256x256 terrain and got a warning saying this would require 1.6GB(!!!) of ram to perform the render in and I should use render to disk as I don't have enough system resources (no funky illuminations either). Went for the render to disk option and it said that you can't use a pile of Vue's render effects when you render to disk and said I'd have to disable them all (I wasn't using any render effects anyway so this wasn't an issue, but if I was trying to make a big image with funky effects enabled....). This is what I'd call an "uh oh" moment - non fatal, but strange nonetheless.

In the end, I'm glad I have V5i and I'm looking forward to using some of those impressive looking features though bryce (mainly 5) is still, at the moment, my main beast of burden due to its relative stability and the familiarity that I have with it.

[endeth essay]

Message edited on: 02/14/2006 21:21

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD