Hi there,

I'm just starting to learn about Vue, how to use it etc. I used Terragen 1 for my enviroment renders, then I tried Terragen 2, and now I'm using Vue and I love it :)

But I have this isue.. I made a scene, above the clouds, added 1 metacloud and an airplane. It looks just the way I want it to be, but the render time is over 7hours! It's insane, I've done similar renders but they never took so long. I'm rendering the image with a 1280x800 resolution 72 DPI, with Final quality, with a 2gb ddr2 ram pc. I thought that the plane or the metacloud is increasing the render time so I removed the from the scene, but it just went from 7hours to 6.30h. I even decreased the resolution to 640x400, but even that was estimated to about 40 minutes! I've rendered high-detail images in 1280x800 faster!

I tried to render the scene that comes with Vue, the one with the mountain surounded by clouds, and the estimate time was like 30-50minutes (forgot the exact estimate). So I'm thinking that maybe I have to tweak the atmosphere or something to decrease detail or set some settings off? The scene really isn't complex so I'm confused why the render time is that long.

Could be that you have the atmosphere settings set to high or a bad combination of things selected.  Please post screen setting of the light tab and clouds tab.  

Metaclouds do increase render times.  

Are you letting Vue render or just seeing the initial time that Vue "thinks" it will take to render?  It's really a worse case guess and more than likely as it renders, the time to finish will decrease a bunch. 

You don't mention your render settings which can have a big impact on render time.  Peggy has a really good tutorial that you might want to take a look at:

<a href="http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf"><span class="attribute-value">http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf</span></a>

Peggy_Walters: what settings should I post? Sun, Light etc?

impish: I'm using the Final setting in the render options box

Is the atmosphere your own? Did you go over the top in quality boost? Estimated render times mean very little, only the time it would take if all the render was excatly the same as the line of pixels Vue is currently rendering.

No I'm using a sunset atmosphere that comes with Vue, i didn't do anything with the quality boost.

I've tried using the settings as impish posted, the estimate came down to 4h30min, after a few minutes it went down to 1h46, now it's 2h55.

I've attached the scene bellow, can someone give me some tips on the settings? This is only the 2nd day I'm using Vue, so I'm having trouble with the settings etc

edit: failed to upload..

There are some preset atmospheres that are set to use volumetric sun - ouch!  Really long render times.  That would be in the sun tab on the atmosphere editor.    

2nd day!  Great!  You'll have a blast with Vue.  

Maybe try some of the other atmospheres for a first try and tell us which atmopshere you were trying to use. 

Thanks for the response, I can't realy check right now I'm trying to render this thing.. Hopefully it will render faster with the render settings, although the estimate time jumped to 11hours :/

I've uploaded the file, can someone be kind enough to download it and give me some pointers on how to set the settings so it would render faster? It would help me out alot

http://files-upload.com/files/647911/clouds.vue

Aaah great Vue crashed ..

Also I have a follow up question regarding quality.

I've rendered the image bellow with the best quality, made everything max, I doubled the trees polygons like 5 times, the terrain is 1024x768, but everything looks so grainy. After looking at the small preview on the right of Vue I thought that that grass will come out mushy and the tree will look picture perfect, but neither of them realy look great, not even good. Can someone give me some pointers on how to do that? I saw a few Vue made trees and grass fields and they look reaaaally spectatuclar, I was wondering how to acomplish that?

Well,for me i like to over do things abit and my renders ALWAYS start as infinite render times,but never take more than an hour or 2 at most..Vue likes to "guesstimate" As for your pic being so grainy, you can go into custom settings and set your texture filtering a bit higher,but for atmos you can go int to you sky/fog/haze tab and better the quality there at the bottom to get rid of the grainy clouds,you dont want to really set both though as it  bogs Vue down hardcore.I suggest rendering in broadcast with your sky/fog haze tab up and your texture filtering set to no more than like 45-50% just personal preferance of course because if it is set to high it looks very smooth,almost unreal,but if you want that look(almost painted) then to each there own(;

Thanks for the response .. but I still don't get it. The same quality and resolution as you did is estimated to over an hour, the percentage is slowly growing, but I can see how it would take so long to render it. I'm confused why this is happening ..

edit: I'm rendering for 5minutes now and it's still only 6% :(

Tell us a bit more about your computer.  

*I've rendered the image bellow with the best quality, made everything max..

Have you read my render setting tutorial?  Setting things to max is NOT a good idea!  Some sliders should never go above a certian limit.   

GeekatPlay has some great beginners tutorials comming up plus a bunch more!
http://geekatplay.com/index.php

YEah,I was going to mention that **Peggy_Walters has a really good .pdf tutorial to read through.
**

Well I thought that the image quality will be better if everything is on max. I've read the tutorial, and I followed it, did the same settings but I still can't get the image with the bench and the tree to be picture perfect, and the plane in the sky still renders for ages.

My PC specs are Intel Core Duo 1.8Ghz, 2GB DDR2 Ram, 256 mb Radeon with ~800mgb turbocache

If you look at your performance meters as Vue renders you will see that Vue's render algos rarely actually use more than around 60% of processor power on a regular basis. Vue's renderer is very, very  inefficient. And in order to get acceptable, non flickering results in an animation, which I have yet to see even on samples from Vue's site, the render times go through the roof.  This alone keeps vue in the hobby category as far as we're concerned.

Part of my confusion with Vue are the numerous tweaks for 'quality'  and the like. They seem like add ons or after-thoughts. 

Now what DOES that mean? Sure.. I want quality! Gimme some.

Well I thought I'd just redo the entire image, and the render time was far less than before. It took 45minutes to render this image at 1280x800 with about 80% overall quality. Can't figure it out why this image rendered faster even with better quality settings although the image is basicly the same, apart from the plane, but it didn't realy add that much time to the render proccess.

Now I must again return to the quality issue. I set the texture smoothing to ~80%, antialiasing, the clouds where best quality .. but it looks unrealistic once again. compared to the images on the official Vue webpage it looks like garbage. Is there ANY possible way to make the quality picture perfect? I mean 80% overall quality is pretty high I think, but just take a look at the image in full size..

80% quality is too much, and won't get you a better render. I will try your scene tomorrow ( Too tired today, sorry), and let you know the results.

Well thanks so much for the effort! It realy means alot to me that you guys are willing to help me out as I'm just starting to learn Vue. Honestly, I can't express my gratitude.

Here are the settings I used for rendering the image, I'd realy like to get some pointers on what to set, what not to set here

Here's the 2nd version of this image, but after rendering the image I decided that I'll need to adjust the spotlight intensity on the plane because it looks too dark, also the clouds near the camera look fine, but the far ones near the horizon look terrible ..

and here's the source file

files-upload.com/files/649704/clouds2.rar

Quote - If you look at your performance meters as Vue renders you will see that Vue's render algos rarely actually use more than around 60% of processor power on a regular basis.

Hmm.  I find my copy runs both cores at 100% for the duration of the render.  Wonder why yours doesn't

OK, here are my recomendations:

Advanced effects quality slider:  No higher than 46%.  Try it between 30 to 46%
NO Texture AA!  Won't help in scenes like this.

Edit AA settings
AA Strategy = Crisp (not automatic!)
Min = 4
Max = 12 
Quality threshold = 75%

If still grainy sky, show a screen capture of the light tab in the atmosphere editor.

A few of things already:
If you use texture filtering, there is really no need to use Texture AA, this will slow down the render without giving better quality, because texture filtering does some texture AA. 55% texture filtering is quite a lot, I generally settle for 24% ( why not 25? because there seem to be a big difference in render times when you go the extra 1%, go figure why!) Also, texture AA should only be used when you see unwelcome patterns or artifacts in your textures, otherwise it's useless.
You have "optimize last render pass" on, well, this speeds up the render, but when using advanced lighting models such as AO, GI or GR, this can create artifacts, and these artifacts show in your render, maybe the reason why you upped the quality so much. Advanced effects quality ca be set as low as 36%, provided you uncheck "optimize last render pass"
You alo have "optimize volumetric lights" on, this is only useful if you actually have volumetric lights in the scene, of course, but yields to artifacts as well, though it speeds up the rendering of volumetric effects. 
Also uncheck "blurred reflections" and "blurred transparencies", if your materials don't use this effect. If they do use this effect, make sure it will be visible in the render, otherwise, many hours wasted on something that can barely be seen, and I don't see any here.
You AA settings are too low, imho, I generally go for min8 max 15, 60% quality.

I can't download your file. I can only dl 212 Ko of the file, instead of the 5 megs.

I think somebies drinkin...

Too early for this, mate!

Possibly(; but one never knows till they try right>>> goo goo g'joob

Well, I'm always up for tyring new things...

Hi Guys,

I've just joined yesterday & found out the Peggy's render settings pdf while browsing... It's quiet informative... but what I wanted to ask is that its written for Vue 5, right? & now its 6.5, so is it still  as useful as before?? Shoudn't it be updated with the latest verison of the Vue? They must have done quiet a few changes n' improvements in the render department since then, right??

Thanks,
-Vishw.

The updated version is included in my Introduction to Vue class that I teach at LVS.  But I still need to expand on it - and yes, one of these days I'll update the public version...  Just finished writing the Intermediate Vue class that will start in January.  Should have a bit more spare time.

http://www.lvsonline.com/index.html

Peggy

Well thanks for all of you for the replys, but I stil can't get the trees looking picture perfect. I tried using the Cherry Tree, maybe it's just low quality to begin with? And the mushy grass, how do I make it look real, now it looks too grainy

Crank up your texture settings to smooth(; If the file doesent have anything copywrite in it you can post it and we can take a look a t it(;

It would be great if someone took a look :)

files-upload.com/files/659958/tree.rar