Attached Link: Micro Film makers Magazine

...and mine are on the link right beneath yours!

sweet. I kind of wish I had had more time to work on those. the people from lighwave are showing us up.

Hmmm...not sure. the lighting may look better in the LW interior render, but it is too strong and textures are washed out. I really think the materials rendered better in Vue than LW, even Maya. Personnally, I tried to stick to the original feel & lighting of the provided scene, since this was all about comparing render engines, so I really don't like the LW lighting setup.
I think the difficult part for Vue was to light up the indoor scene. Vue is made for outdoors, and rendering indoors scene is more difficult, but the results are matching other softwares. But for the night alley scene, you can't beat Vue, imho.
To other readers: the original renders are the Cinema4D ones, bottom of the page.

Had I given it more time vue could have done better than any of those other ones. vue's radiosity engine is really pretty good with indoor scenes in my opinion.

Very nice renders both.  My only gripe with the Vue radiosity engine is it's a bit slow compared to say . . . C4Ds (at least the demo version I've tried is seriously fast.)

of course if Vue ever gets a link to VRay then it's going to hit the big time - that engine is seriously quick

You're right, Frank. But C4D's & VRay are the fastest around I think, not fair to compare them to Vue!  What i find funny about Vue's radiosity engine is that you can up the quality very high with custom photon mapping and gathering, and it won't take much longer to render than the default settings, only preparation times take longer, because this process is not multithreaded. So I hope for Vue7 that radiosity and caustics preparation times will be fully multithreaded and take advantage of multicore CPUs.

very true - I really need to start playing with the custom photon options.  Lets hope that the next Vue update does multithreading for the photon maps/radiosity calculations !! that would be ace

Oh yes! And irradiance caches would be a great addition too, to keep existing photon map in cache while working on the scene, would be faster than toto recompute radiosity when it wouldn't be needed.

Ooo yeah - that would help, also being able to add to the photon map/irradiance cache too bit like 3DS does - that way you don't have to recompute the whole thing if you move a light or camera a bit

Exactly.

It was an interesting challenge (mine are the other ones underneath).

As primarily a photographer, the funniest thing for me was that he said "Make the ligthing and scene realistic", and yet the originals have extraneous shadows, shadows going the wrong way, and entirely too much light in the alley scene.  It was an interesting challenge though.

Quote - It was an interesting challenge (mine are the other ones underneath).

As primarily a photographer, the funniest thing for me was that he said "Make the ligthing and scene realistic", and yet the originals have extraneous shadows, shadows going the wrong way, and entirely too much light in the alley scene.  It was an interesting challenge though.

I think that is because the majority of people consider what is photo realistic is what their eyes see rather than how camera optics, film or CCD's  capture information.
Obviously that doesn't count for bad shadow angles etc, but it does account for many dim lit images and radiosity scenes.

Yeah, the "too much light" is a picky thing, but If you look at the bedroom scene, there's a shadow from the table I believe that is going in the opposite direction....and the lamps in the alley scene cast shadows of their own stems, which is a bit of a no-no.

Yes, noticed the bad shadow too, and none of us made that mistake in Vue!