help am i doing somthing wrong or have i just wasted loads of money on a product that so far has caused nothing but troubble for me and my company? (lost a client due to 1 month wait for software to arrive from e-frontier!)

i have a jungles scene with a chimp that walks through the scene (5 sec) this is set to render to custom size (750x260) and on broadcast quality.  animation set to quicktime high quality.

on my g5 mac this thakes 24hours to render (arrrrh) but this would be fine if the quality was not so rubbish - i have now redered this 2 times both with poor results - the whole scene has grainy, noizy interferance accross the screen and looks like a movie that has been compressed for the web not a dvd quality masterpeice that we need for this project.

so far i feel that i have been ripped off - what with delivery time of 1 month (e-frontier) disasterous customer service (e-frontier) - both of wich ended with me looseing a valueble client, and the seamingly low quality of the final .mov output this is a nightmare.

if you can help i will take it all back (well maybe the quality of video bit!)

thanks for your help guys it is appreciated!

e-Frontier sounds like Poser to me - i guess you purchased the bundle then and not Vue directly from E-on (which as download version is available directly). As it does from e-Frontier i think. Download Poser directly and have it immediately First question is - have you seen good quality movies from Vue before? I assume yes (otherwise you wouldn't have bought the product), So it is essential to find out the differences between your experiences and others. Second is that you do not give a lot of information what you have done. What textures you have used, what atmosphere and so on so it is hard to say what is going on in your case. But there are some basics i would say that you should follow. One is to do all compression and other settings AFTER you have done the rendering. Reason? You then always have a good starting point when something is not satisfying for you. Means? Ideally you render your animation to a bitmap sequence without any sort of compression. Then you make a film out of that with a video program where you can define precisely what level of compression or what codec you want to use. Noise? Maybe you used an atmosphere with a lot of ambient light and/or a lot of haze or fog. All potential candidates for noise. But a lot others are too. Quality of textures to name only one other. Give us some more information, show us examples what happened and i am sure there will be a lot of help here in the forum.

hi, thanks!

the scene in question uses only plants and textures from vue (ones that shiped) as for the atmosphere - ill check out wich one i used in a moment! - i  have one of there sample animations rendering at the moment to see how their example comes out, i guess if the sample animation files all look bad then it is a limitation of the soft rather than me / my brand new g5!

as for the render to bitmap thing - GREAT ill try this and import to after effects and see what happens! i probably should have thought of this already!

thanks for your quick responce! - ill be back soon!

The only test animation I've done in Vue came out great, but that doesn't help you here. I've mainly used Cinema 4D for rendering animations and it's always best to render single frame TIFF's or SGI's and bring them together in QuickTime or After Effects. Doing it like this helps in two ways: it keeps the quality and secondly, if there are any dropped frames you can just render them separately.

I'd say that, if you render a single frame (as a TIFF or BMP) and it looks fine, it's the compression, if it still looks noisy it's some other problem, such as atmosphere.

Mak

is this also faster render times?

Doubt it. Usually the better the quality you go for the longer it takes. Do a test of a 25 frames and see how long it takes, or just render of couple of frames in TIFF and then in QuickTime and see the difference.

Do you have  a sample of the animation we could look at?

yep.....

oh i fell victim to the max size - ill upload then link to..

http://www.monkeydesign.nl/jung01.mov

its 18 mb as i dont want to change the compression so you see the actual output from vue

this was rendered using the settings listed in the intial post (see top of page)

I would guess that it's the atmosphere, tho I don't have a current Vue anymore[demo over boo] I have had similar experiences both in Imagine 3D when using Volumetrics, which is how Imagine produces atmospherics, and way back in bryce and terragen. The answer to the 'crawlies' you're seeing can, to some degree be solved by rendering single frames and re assembling in AE as you suggested, but by and large, computers , I feel , just can't cope with all the miniscule calculations in terms of pixels. Someone post an example to prove me wrong....please...but no matter what software I've tried, the crawlies are omnipresent...been thinking, for a project I'm working on now, of , after rendering frames, printing them out and shooting to actual film as then you can have all the subtlties without concern for the number of pixels on my display.. But that sure don'r solve your problem so...someone/anyone...please post an answer as I'm fairly certain the answer can be implemented in any program once I know what the solution is.

After seeing it I'm leaning towards atmosphere, but I can't be certain. I say this because the only place that isn't noisy is the foreground, camera right green vegitation which, of course, wouldn't have as much atmosphere between it and the camera. It seems to be worse where the most depth is. 

The only real way of discovering this for sure is by rendering a 25/30 frame test without atmosphere and seeing what it looks like?

The other thing it has the look of is something that's rendered at thousands of colours instead of millions. It would be worth checking.

Mak

nice one ill check it out now
thanx

I should probably watch the clip, but I think in general Vue's render engine is intrinisically noisy and I've been looking for ways to balance speed and quality. Don't remember where I saw Phoul's settings for the V5I demo, but I tried them out (Object Anti-Aliasing Min/Max Samples = 6/24 quality slider 90% with no texture anti-aliasing) and it seemed to turn Vue into a completely usable (albeit slow) renderer. I agree with the others - rendering out to a sequence of single TIFFs - I composite in After Effects where I apply a SLIGHT gaussian blur to the image.

Vue is slow. So lately I've been looking into rendering "cards" that I use in my main app. Not the best solution but it's a helluva lot quicker. Can I say helluva in this thread? If not apologies.

It's mainly your atmosphere - go into the atmo editor and choose Global Illumination and you'll be amazed at the difference. If you don't use that (or radiosity), then all your renders will have a kind of "pastel" look to them - no rich color to speak of. Your shadows won't be dark and rich (or go to black at ALL since every texture has 40% ambient - this info is used to calculate what is needed for GI and GR), your highlights won't "pop" - just kinda drab.

And sad to say, Vue still has noticeable grain in Broadcast quality. They count on the video signal itself to cover the noise - which it might over transmission, but not a DVD. You're going to have to up the quality to Superior if you want to really get rid of the grain in subtle shadows.

And lastly, yes, don't use any compressed format for your original render - try TARGA or TIF sequence as suggested above (I'm guilty of going straight to AVI myself, but for what I'm doing it works just fine) for the highest quality starting point.

Good luck!
-Lew ;-)

Vue may be slow but IIRC when I had the demo, there was reference to 'network' rendering and I think it can use multiple cpu's...correct me if I'm wrong, but all these things are tricks for speeding up renders. Imagine3D [my personal app I use] doesn't have network or the ability to use multiple cpus so I generally [when I have a big one that really needs fast rendering] I talk a coupla my friends into letting me hi jack their  computers for a bit and install Imagine on all the puters and divide the frames by the number of computers... the work gets done a lot faster, but adds the compositing if I wasn't going to .

speed is not my main concern - i can try the above tip also though - i have a bunch of g4 powerbooks and g5 desktops so will check out the whole network thing!

thundering 1 thanks for the tip - im in a different project at the monment and just clicked the global setting and allready it looks sooooo much better!

this forum is a great help - i now run my own design agency but i am self taught and when learning other programs had been amazed at how slow forums genraly have been - in fact i usualy dont bother as normaly worked things out for myself before i got a sensible responce!

YOU GUYS ROCK!!!

That's a large part of what this fine Community of artists is all about. I don't even own, or use Vue at the moment [it's a financial thing, I love the prog] but tricks I use in the ones I own are often applicable in other apps....and platforms as I'm pc you're Mac...just a bunch of cool new brushes....LOL

how bout a heads up when y get the new test done....

no worries ill post here as soon as finished - its 6am monday morning here and i just worked for last 20 hours so im going to crash for a few hours and then ill come back and finish it -(gotta love public holidays)..

Sleep well ("good work, rest well, most likely kill you in the mornig." - watched Princess Bride recently, can you tell?) - yeah please post when done - I'm looking forward to seeing the results!

And you can actually thank Bruno (pretty sure...?) for that tip and info about GI - I was reducing my textures' ambient to 0% to get the results I was looking for and he pointed that out to me - WOW what a difference - especially in render times for me (40hr renders cut down to arounf 6!!).
-Lew ;-)

Glad to hear you've got things sorted. Get that render farm going and you'll be flying. Hope you got some sleep and have great May Day.

Mak

you know - i left jungle project on to render last night (my other project for artist hadleigh averill looks great when i use these tips - bit of luck as just found out my first vue animation project will feature in a exhibition at the new york sachi gallery!) but it still loos the same - to be fair i have just notices it was on broadcast not superiour but no different - used global illumination + rendered to tiff + millions of colours+  + i changed atmosphere from hazy one to cleaner one and chopped out few plants that got deformed!

Seems like you've run into the same 'roadblock' I've run into in all the apps I've tried [Terragen,Vista Pro, Bryce(early version),and my first choice Imagine3D]. I know there is a way around the "crawlies" as they seem to be called, but so far it has escaped me as well. Too bad really as I was looking at V5I as the animation route I will invest in as it does so many other things just superbly...as I don't own Vue I have no real right to ask these questions of their support team, but you in fact, could...have you?...they may have an answer ...

(scratches head thinking...)
Maybe try this:

Go back into the atmo editor, click the Light Tab:
Reduce Light Intensity to around -45
Raise Light Balance to around 75%
Change Ambient Light Color (dble-click the color) and make it a DARK MUTED color (browns or maybe blues).

Now click on the Clouds Tab:
Reduce Global Exposure and Global Illumination - don't have to go far to see the diference.

Back out to scene:
Add a couple of Spotlights shooting in close to the same direction as the sun AND:
1 - Disable their Lens Flare (little "star" icon at upper left of the properties box where you normally see/pick your textures).
2 - Widen the cone angle to maybe 50 degrees.
3 - widen the Fallof to maybe 60% - don't worry, it looks great - or at least it's a starting point for play.
4 - Make them at 50% softness so their shadows don't compete with the sun's.
5 - change their color to either match or augment the sun's color (warm or cool tone in like with the sun).
6 - Raise their Power level - try 300 as a start.

Now do a test render of a single frame and see what you think. - you don't have to do multiple frames - just one to see how it's gonna look.
Adjust where you want - it the shadows are too dark you can up the Global Illumination or Exposure, or add soft lights to fill them in like a cinematographer would. You can even add hard brighter lights to have "shimmers" and backlighting for more dynamic looks.

Hope this helps - good luck!
-Lew ;-)

nice one- ill give this a go (must finnish other jobs first!) ill shout back in a bit when i done it - cheers!

Are you able to use "'illumination baking", or ambient occlusion in your animation when rendering? I haven't been able to D/L your ani, but if you have a lot of static objects in your background, you might be able to speed up the animation rendering tremendously while also much reducing the "crawlies" by using this feature.