If you're running Infinite, take a close look at the Procedural Terrain scenes that came with Vue.  This should give you a better idea of how this is done.

Lin

If he's trying out the demo, I don't think he has any scene. This terrain you see is a procedural terrain, and it was made by one of the best Vue artists. Procedural terrains are created using the function editor, by combining different fractal noise nodes and turbulences. I suspect the one above uses the "voronoi altitude" fractal noise. You can have smooth or had surfaces by changing the roughness parameter of the noise, and you can also apply the erosion effects of the terrain editor.

There is a good Procedural Terrain tutorial for sale at Cornucopia 3D. It runs inside the Vue 5 Infinite help system, so you can work alongside it. Might even be from the artist that did that scene - looks familiar.

I find that i usually have to scale down the vertical size of terrains from Vue, after they are out of the Terrain Editor and incorporated into the scene.

The Vue Function Editor is a fantastic creative tool - bringing much of the power of 3D programming to the non-programmer. It's well worth the effort of learning, IMO. 

_jc  'Art Head Start' e-book: Learn digital art skills $19.95
'Art Head Start.com Free chapter, Vue tutorials, models, Web Tutorials Directory.

I myself wish that this paricular scene would be on the resource CD; not only the terrain is beautiful but also the water is perfect; how could this artist render without ANY "grains"? (I believe this is robertczarny's stunning work) 

yeah, I too would like to know how to eliminate the graininess in my water.  is it as simple as increasing the anti alias for the materials?

I hated working with the V5i trial version... I have sympathy for my friend posting above.  They wouldn't even let you save your scene, and it crashed constantly- got very frustrating.

The scene is indeed by robertczarny, who produced the tutorials Jim was talking about. Graininess is caused by too much ambient light in the scene. Kill the ambient light in the atmosphere editor. Grain can be caused by bump too, so reduce the bump of your water and it should render better.

bruno: IMHO there has to be something else to the grainyness other than too much amb. light or different lighting conditions; I believe that it's a render engine problem; one probably have to increase the AA settings to the limits to obtain pics like above.

I took a fast look at my Bryce renderings and the difference is almost shocking: no grains in my Bryce waters at all (with many different light conditions, simplest AA settings); I never had to think about "grainyness" in water when working with B; I hope Vue can iron out this particular problem.

Did you try changing the material scale? changing it to 2 or more gives good results most of the time.

Thanks bruno, I'll try it...but I'm still sure that grainyness is a render engine problem; for ex. when you set certain options on lower quality then you get "grains" instead of a smooth area (especially in shadows) ; you have to increase your AA or Quality settings up to 90-100% to get the same result as in Bryce when it's at its simplest settings.

Quality settings tend to make render times rocket skyhigh for nothing, imho. I leave the quality settings below 50% (46, actually), and I don't see any difference. But yes, high AA levels are needed.

Well, I would tend to agree with Bruno here...too much ambient light does cause too much grain. People use to ask me how I could get my DOF so smooth and the only way I could find to get smooth DOF while not creating insane render times was to cut down on the ambience and add more fill lights.

Generally, IMHO most of the default atmospheres within Vue, have way too much ambient light, causing too grainy and insipid images for my own taste.

Cheers

so... If I'm using the GA lighting (for shorter render times for animations) is there a way to get less graininess w/out lighting up my exteriors by hand?  The whole reason I bought vue was for the animation and beauty of lighting by loading an atmosphere... I don't want to go putting lights in by hand to fake the ambient.

I read on Ryan Spaulding's site that he suggested increasing the lighting quality to +1 or +2... but then again render times start going thru the roof w/ +2 or better.  For animations I have to have them quicker than that or my bosses are not going to be thrilled with me.  They'll just say 'forget the wind in the trees and get me the flyaround and I'll be back on the VIZ chain gang singing spirituals as I hammer at obscure pointless setting after obscure pointless setting... tweak, render, tweak render, oooweeooo hoooo chi minh....

I will boost the OAA and TAA up to the 80 percents and see if that works... and increase my light qual to +1 for now... hopefully that will do the trick.

Don't turn on Texture AA, waste of time, but go for 100% AA, with settings like 6-20. And don't increase the GA quality to +1 right from the start. Make a test render first, and see if it's really needed.

good tip, Bruno, I gathered something sim. from more in-depth study of R.S.s website.

I did many test renders tonight. 

I have a machine with (2)dual core processors and 3Gigs of RAM.... keep that in mind as you read that these render times are on a machine using 100% of all four processors.

I will try to get RSpaulding to post them on his site.

I rendered the same frame w/ GA at +1.5.  I have my sky gain to 1.0, my lighting set at like .54, 75, 100 for those 3 sliders. 

I turned off indirect light and shadows on veg.  I rendered over and over with TAA OFF and OAA at 65, 70, 75, 80, 85 respectively per render. 

All renders were at 720x405 (regular television quality, widescreen 16:9 aperature)

I don't have the times here with me but they were something like 7mins for the 65%OAA quality to 14min40secs for 85%quality

I then did something interesting, I checked the little box in the OAA that basically meant TO NOT optimize the OAA... I'm at home now, sorry I don't remember what the little box was called. and ran the same render at 85%... the render time INCREASED again by almost 1.5mins to around 16minutes.  HOWEVER - the quality of the AA was more accurate in my opinion.  Some of the highlighted areas from the previous 85% render were now less washed out, and more details could be seen, while overall the vegetation was smoothed nicely from what I could tell.

To get rid of the pixelation of these images, you are correct Bruno- higher object anti-alias (OAA) is definitely it... and I can see that 95% or better would be perfect, while 85% is probably close enough for government work.

However, as an architect, I have deadlines, and they don't allow me the luxury (although I'm using all 5 render cows to their fullest extent) of tying up computers for days and days to render.

So I chose 65% quality and chose NOT to 'optimize' the OAA, so there will be a bit longer render time than 7 mins/frame, but hopefully it will finish before the weekend is over... and hopefully it will not have the pixelation and light and dark ripple-like effect on the brick surfaces of my last animation.

I should have tried baking the indirect illumination to some of the model, but when I tried that before it increased my file size by something like 500%!

Any tips on baking illumination would be welcome... to bake or not to bake, that is the question.

I also didn't weld my model... maybe I should have to see if it effects render times... I don't know.  Tips on that would also be welcome.

Welding has a huge impact on render times, as well as grouping objects that are close to each other ( a group is at least 3 near by objects, grouping 2 objects has no influence).

Saving your objects as vob will also speed up the render, but the vob format creates larges object files.

when you say 'huge impact' does that mean that it decreases the render times in a huge way?

so you haven't experimented with illumination baking?

Yes, I meant decrease. I haven't experimented with baking much. I tried to bake some flower mesh illumination once, and pushed the accuracy slider to 100%, and Vue crashed. That was a long time ago, maybe it's better now.