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Vue F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2024 Sep 14 4:17 pm)
Subject: Jungle Test Results
For all example purposes ....from a movie like Pirates of the Carabean.....(to be used as the start of a matte painting)
"Jungle Scenario test":
- 4,000 pixels by 1500 pixels 16 bit
- Lighting model: Bisbee (from spectral sun out of the box)
- Global Illunimation
- Utlra render (no tweaks)
- FOG, Haze, dust set to qaulity boost 12 (to prevent grain)
33,724,445,865 polys
800,000 instances
5 different plant types from Ecosystem editor
Render time:40 hours (quad core machine windows xp pro)
Summary:
Im pleased with the over all result....a conrolable landscape with varied tropical vegetation. Variation is good. Haze is good.
Dislikes:
-
There still is a detectable grain in darker areas (I would boost my fog quality up a little) or go to radiosity)
-
There are some anomolies in darker areas (this is not the first time Ive seen this phenomon) Usually you have to kick it up to radiosity....
-
Dealing with professional size mattes means professional size render times. In 40 hours I could easily have painted what I have now.....
For large sizes a render farm is a MUST wether your in a studio or you rent one....
VERY UNHAPPY WITH RENDER TIMES
Lets face it the cool professional render settings are at GI and Radiaosity...
- Didnt like the sky.....over all you can get a base sky in there....but you can spend days tweaking skys to be less CG....or you can render what you got and just fix the sky and tradionally paint it....(or use photos)
Comments etc....
That looks generally good.
Like I wrote before in one of your threads, the Ultra render setting is not good enough. If you are discontent with the render time, it's important that you use "user settings" and learn what each thing does. Ultra setting has too low AA, for example, and unnecessarily high advanced effects quality.
The clouds are immediately recognizable as "vue standard" and not very realistic, IMO. I think you should invest some time in investigation and construction of "your" clouds. Build once to your liking, use forever. That's what I did. I don't use any of Vue standard clouds.
Quote " 1. There still is a detectable grain in darker areas (I would boost my fog quality up a little) or go to radiosity)"
That grain can probably not be solved by radiosity. I suspect that the grain is due to low AA settings. Ultra has 80% quality of AA, you probably need more than 90%.
Quote "2. There are some anomolies in darker areas (this is not the first time Ive seen this phenomon) Usually you have to kick it up to radiosity...."
Do you have only trees in that ecosystem? It would seem that way. A real forest has underbush and all kinds of grass. You should imitate this in your ecosystems to get rid of those black areas and also have more plant diversity (it seems too even right now).
Some questions, I want to clarify some things that could maybe justify those strange shades of green in the shaded areas:
What value do you use in the quality boost in the light tab of the atmospheric setting?
What values did you use for light balance and ambient light?
What value did you use in sky dome lighting gain?
I would add these arent my optimom settings....I would have used custom settings...but I stopped when it got to 40 hours......(which is why I didnt tweak the clouds...my test renders where like 20 minutes)
What is fustraiting is things look better small.....(like the clouds) and you wait 40 hours for a final render...and its like OUCH!
now that I know I have to use a renderfarm for final render...I can kick out the jams with those killer settings discussed in older threads
Settings used for that render:
artificial ambience: .30
shadow density of sunlight: 40% (default ultra setting)
sky dome lighting gain: .50
light balance and ambient light: 81% and 50%
atmospheric setting: Spectral
volumetric sun and godrays: NOT checked.....
(Now Im gonna pay the 10 bucks to get a renderfarm render with proper settings)
IMHO
Vue has arrived......the only draw back is if you dont know optimizing tricks...the program can become slow.....so slow that you could matte paint the traditional way...
I hope this helps people trying to do larger professional size mattes
Hi,
I agree it look good but Rutra is right about the settings, I'd hazzard a guess it should be closer to 8hrs max and better quality, never use the preset Vue settings, they are way to general a pile of waste my time.
Rutra up-loaded a scene/atmo in this forum a couple of threads back, grab that and take it from there.
Cheers
Chris
Quote "shadow density of sunlight: 40% (default ultra setting)"
Ultra setting has nothing to do with shadow density of sunlight. Do you really have shadow density at 40%? That's way too low. It should be at 80% or 85%.
Do you really have Global Illumination? I ask because you wrote that you used Bisbee and this has Global Ambience by default. Using Global Ambience could explain those strange shades of green in the shaded areas.
Quote - "What is fustraiting is things look better small.....(like the clouds) and you wait 40 hours for a final render...and its like OUCH!"
You should do small area renders with good quality settings and with final size and check what it looks like. Just select a very small portion of the sky and render it with what you want to be your render settings and final size.
IMPORTANT: I asked what is the quality boost of the light tab of atmospheric settings but you didn't reply. This can have a DRAMATIC effect in render time. If you have light balance that high, you can safely put that quality boost at -0.5 or even less (I would go as low as -0.8), without noticing any effect in the render quality. Notice: it's a negative value!
I really think you should study Vue more. Study very well what all settings do. It's time well invested.
Just for comparison:
I rendered the scene http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1676006
in 1600x1200, at 300dpi (not the one posted here, I did this higher definition render later) and, despite all the vegetation (750,000 plant instances and 25 billion polys), water reflections and transparency, it rendered in 5 hours, in a quadcore.
Shadow density at %40
Yes I put it on Global Illumination
Quality boost of light tab: 0%
Its hard to compare scenes...the only true scientific test is I email you the file and see if it takes you 40 hours to render. I assure you I have a pretty incredible computer.....I paid $7,000 for the build in Jan 2007....
Like I said those quality settings were not my first choice.....when render times started going through the roof....I halted at ultra
Im sure your suggestion settings will solve all this....I will try a render on the rent-a-farm with some of the settings you suggested.
Which comes to my conclusion....to produce really hardcore pics that compares to *Yusei Uesugi and ILM.....
you need da render farm!*
Got the file but it contains an item I don't have "date_palm_3.veg". I will replace it by some other palm.
But... when I opened the file the first thing I noticed was that you have a very big light panel behind the camera to provide ambient light. I would say that's not a good idea. I made some tests with light panels some months ago and found out that they easily create blotches in the shadows (and, if I'm not mistaken, it also increases render times considerably). I would strongly recommend to delete the light panel. Vue has two better tools (IMO) to do just what you are trying to achieve with the light panel. You can increase the sky dome lighting gain (my recommendation) or create a dark blue directional light.
I will do some tests tomorrow because it's 3 a.m. here and I have to get some sleep...
Its actually a 2K map...set at 1K lol
Is the scene optimised ? ...No....it isnt....
it was fast and loose...to get results as quickly as possible...much like a working enviorment in a studio.....(which was my objective as a test)
Quote - One very last thing before going to bed. I also noticed you have your terrain set to 1024x1024. That's completely unnecessary because the terrain is not visible at all (it's covered with plants). So, it's just cluttering your file with unnecessary polygons.
Artur,
Yeah the image plane was for some fill. It comes from being a Maya Mental Ray user.......(I like to light with Area lights) the are very similar to kinoflows (which are commonly used on set )...you might have found the reason that file is going through the roof......
Chip recommends using a 2nd sun...but I didnt notice any power controls on the 2nd sun.
So what did you do about those custom trees I bought? I was going to send one to the Ranch full radiosity...with your settings........but if the ranch doesnt have those assets.....it wont render the right trees.....
Have you ever used the renderfarm ranch? (Also dont kill yourself with all this work)(although it is kind of fun to really test Vue no?)
Some thoughts:
- I also have trouble with getting realistic skies. I first used some modified stock ones, and then tended to use only a few ones I knew that "worked well". I then purchased atmospheres and am starting to use them. Making good cloud textures takes a lot of time and studying existing ones is quite informative. Check out LightVue (they have freebies)
- Have you checked this PDF that shows you how to optimize render settings?
- Your jungle scene has a large number of trees and the light panel. This is probably what makes the render time so long. But it would have been far worse if you had included water or volumetric lights!
Fantasy pictures,
free 3d models, 3d tutorials
and
seamless textures on Virtual Lands.
Area lights are great for creating certain types of lighting but you do need to change the settings in Vue to get a good render with them. They are not a good way of creating a fill light at the moment except in small scale scenes. For a vast landscape I'd go with Chipp's suggestion of an infinite light with its power controlled by changing its colour.
If you were working on a close up the old tricks for simulating area lights with arrays of point or spot lights work well and allow you to control the brightness. The added bonus of that method is the render times are significantly less than an area light. Personally I'd only ever use them when the light is visible in a render, is very close to an object that is in the render or will be reflected by an object in a render - the rest of the time an array of lights is far more efficient.
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Thanks for the info....Chipp
I tried the second sun trick once.....(duped sun, turned off shadows)...but couldnt find the level control......so switched to an planar light........(which are really great lights in Mental Ray)....will give sun another try......
That fill light is the biggest problem with Vue lighting.....I think I will definitely always need a fill light in my scenes...(I tend to light for magic hour)
......in Mental Ray you have the ability to create a true lighting simulation.....which means you can shoot photons that calculated real bounced light......(color bounce and key bounce).....
Vue bounce light is a little weak.....it doesnt have a real GI or photons.....
(But then again I havent tested severe hi-end settings of the render to get better bounce fill)
(but then again Vue's version of GI is a fake Global Illumination, along with its Ambient Occlusion)
Also....THANKS FOR EVRYONE'S INPUT! (great discussion)
Quote - Paul,
The second sun is the same as Rutra's directional light. You can control the power of it by changing it's color to dark blue- as he suggests.
The Ranch renderfarm has all of the necessary Cornucopia files, so you don't need to worry about them not being available.
best,
Chipp
The panel trick is old school! Thats something from Eric Hansen's playbook! I love it!
I was just partial to Area lights from Maya.....(1 because they were native Mental Ray lights) (2 they were the only lights that actually resembled realworld lights...kinoflows)
I guess its stupid because Im not using Mental Ray......although I havent tried using Vue with Maya MR
My big complaint with any CG lights is they have nothing to do with real world lights......it was always some voodoo science for a lighting artists to match the lights on the DPs set. Then HDRIs were invented and people started paying attention to real world lighting from the set.....a buddy of mine is working on creating a whole catalogue of Mole Richardson into Mental Ray lights.....
One question why would you make the light Blue? (I assume its for bounce light in the shadow?) Alot of the bounce light from a forrest canopy would have green in it too....from all the leaves....
Quote - Area lights are great for creating certain types of lighting but you do need to change the settings in Vue to get a good render with them. They are not a good way of creating a fill light at the moment except in small scale scenes. For a vast landscape I'd go with Chipp's suggestion of an infinite light with its power controlled by changing its colour.
If you were working on a close up the old tricks for simulating area lights with arrays of point or spot lights work well and allow you to control the brightness. The added bonus of that method is the render times are significantly less than an area light. Personally I'd only ever use them when the light is visible in a render, is very close to an object that is in the render or will be reflected by an object in a render - the rest of the time an array of lights is far more efficient.
The array of lights trick is older school than area lights though: we used to have to do that before software had area lights. Area lights have only been in Vue since Vue 6 so the odds are they haven't been through the optimization cycle in development many times.
I had to do architectural lighting calculations by hand on my degree so I found out the hard way that sometimes the approximate methods give a result that is often almost identical to the more accurate method but a lot quicker - in many cases when light sources are not close to an object the calculated values are identical for different ways of representing the same light.
As computers get more powerful the need to use these tricks to do stuff becomes less and less important - until you want to push things closer to the limits by doing very large renders or long animations. Then it comes down to your patience and your deadlines. Personally I'd prefer to use one of the tricks and get the render in less hours that will look so close to using an area light that took lots more hours.
A friend of mine teaches CG at degree level and every year five or six students are "purists" who use every advanced bit of the software they use and every year two of the purists fail the course because they don't submit on time because their render is still running a week after the deadline. Another friend of mine is a model builder for the film industry who specialises in cityscape and urban shots. Every year his company picks up half its work from bailing out films that had commissioned CG cityscapes from new and inexperienced CG company couldn't deliver because they made the models too detailed.
As to why he uses blue rather than grey to dim an area light I can guess but Chipp will give you the answer I'm sure...
impworks | vue news blog | twitter | pinterest
Yep, stay away from Area lights, as they take forever to render. You can adjust directional lights (like your duplicated sun) by editing it's color. Edit the value of the color to adjust light intensity. Edit the hue to affect overall light color.
It's an old architectural rendering trick to put blue (cool light) in the shadows. It offsets nicely the warm glow of the sun, and typically is a function of the reflected light from the sky. You are certainly welcome to use any color you like.
It's not unlike painters using green as an underlay color for building flesh tones on a portrait. Complimentary colors, even subtle ones, add a pleasing effect to a picture.
My lighting tutorial :)
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html
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I know I'm a little late to this thread, but here's my .02.
The one thing that really struck me was the odd colors of the trees in the shadow areas. One thing that I always do is tweak the texture's Diffuse and Ambient in the Effects tab of the material screen. The default ambient, to me, is too high. I always take that from the default of 40 to about 33-36.
I also usually take the shadow density down to about 75%. Always seems to work well for me.
Other than that, it's a nice image. I kinda' like it!
I removed all your trees because I had problems with two or three of them. I just used the standard palm tree and coconut tree. They don't look very nice but for my purpose, above, it was ok.
I changed several things in your atmospheric settings. The most important was that I replaced GI by AO. I found no significant difference in the tests I made, for this particular scene. Another very important change was that I removed softness from the sun because from the tests I made, for this particular scene the softness didn't have any significant effects and was slowing down everything
tremendously. I will make another post with a screenshot of the atmospheric light settings.
Quality boost of sky fog and haze: you had 12, i used zero.
I did not use a second sun (or directional light, as Vue calls it). Neither that nor sky dome lighting gain. I found that the simple haze was sufficient to light the shadows if the sun shadow density was set at 90%
You used the "closeup ground pack" for the base texture of the mountains. That's a huge texture file (1500x1000), suitable for close-ups, not for distant terrains (specially if they're invisible, like in this case). It unnecessarily slows down everything. I replaced it by a procedural, fast grass simulation. It's invisible anyway.
Notes on render settings:
You had optimize volumetrics light on in the render settings. That's not a good idea because "optimize" means less quality. Anyway, in this particular scene this didnt matter because you had no volumetric lights.
You had advanced effects quality at 100%. That's way too much specially because there's no significant advanced effects here. You only need that in very special situations. To put it at 100% in this scene is just a waste of render time. I changed it to 46%.
You had texture antialiasing. There's no need for it in this scene, the aliasing doesn't come from the textures here, obviously.
Your render settings were unbalanced. You had excessive subrays but an insufficient value in the quality slider.
You had min subrays per pixel at 81. That's excessive, IMO. I set it at 8.
You had max subrays per pixel at 156. That's also excessive. I set it at 20.
On the other hand, AA quality was too low, which explains a lot of the grain. You had it at 85%, i put it at 95%.
WOW...incredible work.....I think the image is very close if you had my trees. (I noticed you had like 231 billion polys!)
I will never just use the base setting in an atmosphere again...
I will be using a check list on all this new info....
This really is an intensive thread!
One of the things that really scares me is in the FX world.......the post sup or superviser will zoom in %200 and inspect your matte....(they will definitely flag alot of images on the forums for stupid stuff)......its really important to hammer out all these render options....(this has become a very valuable thread)
Yeah would make a killer DVD tutorial......"optimized renders for mattepainting" or the real dirt on Vue's render...
Quote - Just another outstanding thread here at the shop...
I wonder if one could stuff the best threads here into a pdf. for all to have...
You know, "The Best of Rendo" or something...
Quote - Yeah would make a killer DVD tutorial......"optimized renders for mattepainting" or the real dirt on Vue's render...
Quote - Just another outstanding thread here at the shop...
I wonder if one could stuff the best threads here into a pdf. for all to have...
You know, "The Best of Rendo" or something...
Actually, track down every Vue 6 Infinite epic thread, There have been many, and compile them all into a pdf. with all the killer info in one package. Maybe another thread...
Between here and Cornucopia, someone will know the answer to pretty much every single question you could ever want to know about Vue (and quite a few questions you didn't even know you had)
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checkthegate - Very good scene you've got going there!
Rutra - Nice work as always. I would have gone pretty much with everything you've said here, my basic render settings are almost identical to what you have here.
The one thing which stands out for me which I have come to experiment with on most scenes is the 'quality boost' tab in the light editor. If you turn this down as you have done here & have other settings right to compensate then render times really will come down. I am surprised you got such results with a -4.0 setting though!
BTW, what did you use for your 'softness' setting for the sunlight? I know changing this setting can really enhance some scenes depending on how you want your light/shadow spread, but going too high on this setting will really increase render time.
Top marks again Rutra for helping people out with settings!
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Here is the test results from my Jungle test.
A attempt to render a professional size matte....4K 16 bit.
SKY, FOG, HAZE quality boost: 12