Any news? If it is like other years, E-On should be showing "something" :biggrin:

There was an email a few days ago from E-On showing the Siggraph schedule and on that schedule, there is someone demonstrating the new features in Vue 9.

Jon

I'll be at SIGGRAPH.  But I'll be hanging out with other vendors booths/panels.

10 seconds of google-ing provided this link.

• EcoSystem 4: dramatically reduced flickering, optimized rendering and memory management for Dynamic EcoSystems, and more...
• Relighting: to instantly adjust the lighting of the scene after the render completes, lights can be turned on and off, colors can be changed, all in real-time!
• HDR Multi-Pass Rendering,
• HyperBlob Technology: convert HyperTextured MetaBlobs to polygon objects with user defined LOD - ideal for the creation of extremely rich and detailed rock formations,
• Improved Terrain Editor: new Decal and Smear brushes, automatic Terrain Retopology, Sculpting and Painting masks, Terrain Canvas extension, Contextual brushes, custom terrain brushes...
• Custom Interfaces: Create simplified high-level controls and access these controls directly from the material editor, the terrain editor or the object editors!
• Interactive Network Rendering,
• Auto Saving and Scene Snapshots: this unique and innovative technology automatically saves the scenes in the background, while working, without slowing the user down in his flow!
• And much more (Rocky Mountains fractals, Inverse Kinematics, Cloud Radiosity, Real-World units, Catmull-Clark subdivision, improved texture management, native Cocoa, new interface design, ...)
  The entire Vue 9 product line, including products for 3D Artists, and products for 3D Enthusiasts, is scheduled for release Q4 2010.

ooooooooooooooh!?

• that's sounds like Maxwell's "Multilight" ability, where you can render then AFTER render, change strength of lights, which is absolutely awesome by the way.

hmm
I wonder which of these features will make it into
Vue 9 Complete vers?

Sounds interesting.  I decided to skip 8 and have been waiting for info on 9.

Scott

Anything there about procedural global erosion? This is a holy grail of terrains.

I don't think anyone realizes how important this really is. Could be wrong. The reason i stopped using Terragen 2 was because of this. Nothing looked aged or morphed by recent geology within the terrain.

Last year there were videos of the sessions. This time is there something?

I think GeekatPlay will be recording the demos.  I'd check their site first. 

I taped two presentations today at Siggraph and will upload them on Youtube within the next couple of days. Dax Pandhi also told me that e-on is trying to find a way to make all presentations available online.

ah good! :)

anyone able to comment on the "relighting" ability?

I am converting the taped presentations right now. Since I want to upload them in Full HD for best viewing quality it will take my poor Notebook the whole day to finish converting. So expect to see the videos on Youtube tomorrow.

Siggraph was well worth the visit. First and foremost I want to say that the e-on staff is really nice and friendly. I had the pleasure to meet Dax Pandhi, Vladimir Chopine and Amy Chopine and they are all incredibly nice people. Really heartwarming and so talented :-). Nicolas Pellegrino was there, as well. It's nice to connect the voice of the asilefx tutorials to a face ;-). I also ran into Dave Burdick and when I read his name on the badge I was like "Wow. It's great to meet the amazing python guy who made SkinVue." He was sort of surprised and probably a little scared of that crazy young guy that he didn't know ;-). Anyway, I had a nice chat with all of them and it was great to get to know the people behind the software.

The showreel was very similar to the one from 2009. On the demo PCs there was a screensaver that showed a lot of C3D portfolio artwork. I recognized images from kenwas, Arthur, Lars, Gary Miller, offrench, Dax Pandhi, Geek at Play, Gill Brooks, me and many more.

On to the new products. First up: Carbon Scatter

Not much to say about this one, it's identical to the Material Editor's interface when you are editing an Ecosystem material. If you don't want to purchase XStream, but you do want to use Ecosystems, then Carbon Scatter is the app to purchase. Eco Painting, all the usual standard Ecosystem controls, it's all there in an absolute identical interface to Vue's material editor. Don't know about Dynamic Population, though. The demonstration was done in 3DS Max No info on pricing or availability.

LumenRT: I wasn't impressed at all with that one, the promo image in the press release is a bit deceiving. To me it looked like a simple game engine from the 2000s where the radiosity lighting and reflections where baked on low-res textures. Plants are 2D sprites, the sky is a usual skybox.  However, I am lacking the technical knowledge, so I am not the one to judge. Since they didn't show how to create your own LumenRT environment I don't know what to really expect from this one. If you want to show your client the 3D environement, all you need to do is send him the compiled executable file of your LumenRT scene. He doesn't need a special plugin or an extra viewer, it's just a normal executable. That's a good feature. Again, no idea about price or launch date.

Now for the interesting part, Vue 9. Unfortunately I appeared to be the only one in the audience who had used Vue before, so the demonstrations were merely showcasing to all the others how Vue works in general, what Ecosystems are etc.

Here's a list of a couple of new or changed things that I noticed nonetheless:

• New interface: buttons now have a rectangle border around them which makes them look more professional and cleaner. Smaller buttons in editors have been rearranged and grouped together, for example all the shadow & lighting options in the material editor (only shadows, don't cast shadows, doublesided etc.). New symbols for parameters that are driven with a function and for a couple of other things. All in all very subtle changes that make Vue look more professional and that enhance the workflow. Very welcome.

• New subdivision slider ("divide up to...") on the Displacement & Bump Tab on the material editor. In addition to the quality of displacement materials you might now be able to specify the catmull clark subdivision level of your displaced material. Not sure about that one, though, since it wasn't demonstrated.

• A lot of new buttons and controls in the terrain editor, all related to creating your own 3D brushes. Looks almost as flexible as Photoshop brush controls. I am still on 8.4, so I don't know if there's a big difference to 8.5 or not. Again, no demonstration about the new features.

• New Rocky mountain fractal. Dax told me that this is supposed to be used in combination with other fractals - it will create rocky (or stonelike) structures on top of the terrain. I didn't see any finished images with it, but it reminded me a lot of the Fake stone shader concept in Terragen 2.

• Relighting. Probably one of the most interesting and impressive features. There's a new option in the render settings panel right beneath the G-Buffer/Multipass rendering options. This option is called "Enable relighting". Check this box and when the render is finished you will have a list of all the lights in your scene in the post render options (including the sunlight). Each light has its own intensity slider that you can use to make the light brighter or turn it off altogether. I hope that negative values will be possible, as well. You can also change the color of your light and save the settings like any other post-processing settings with your scene. Apparently rendertime doesn't increase at all with this feature. This can save you hours of rerendering your scene with different light settings. An awesome feature. My suggestion: Put some point lights in your scene at very dark places and then render the scene out. If it looks ok, leave the light turned off. If it's too dark then gradually increase the light intensity in the post render dialogue and see what it looks like.

• No changes in the atmosphere editor or to spectral clouds (sadly, no Metacloud improvement), except for cloud radiosity. In 6, 7 and 8 a high shadow density made the scene very, very dark if the clouds were covering most of your sky. With cloud radiosity clouds are now able to bounce back light as well and thus decreasing the shadow density on ground.

• Very important improvement: DRAMATICALLY reduced flickering!! E-on showed a comparison video between 8 and 9 with the same (final? broadcast?) render settings. Flickering is almost gone in Vue 9 without having to crank the AA way up. Of course this was a very simple demo scene - a terrain with a couple of cherry trees on top and a moving camera - but if both scenes were indeed rendered with the same settings the improvement is a giant leap forward. Good job, e-on.

• Interactive network rendering: There's a new network rendering option in the render dialog. I've never used network rendering before, so I have no idea how that one differs from render cows or a render bull network which are both still available.

• Hyperblobs: Basically, you can bake hypertextures to polygon objects now. Nice little addition that makes life a lot easier.

When I talked to one programmer I told him that I was very disappointed with the stability of Vue 8 and that 7 worked way better on my PC. I also said that I am not going to upgrade unless I read about truely improved stability in Vue 9. He agreed that stability is their biggest issue and that they are trying really hard to make Vue 9 way more stable and better performing than previous versions. That's also the reason why they didn't introduce a whole lot of new features this time around which is a good thing in my opinion. Another guy told me that e-on is indeed looking into a solution for creating waterfalls, but that might still take a couple of years until they are ready to implement it into a future version. For future versions I suggested to provide an option that enabled the user to drive the Detail amount slider for clouds with a custom function. He said that this is a very interesting idea that they haven't thought of and it shouldn't be too hard to implement. When I told him about Terragen 2 and its displacement possibilities he grinned insecurly and told me to screw that software ;-). At least he promised that displacement in Vue 9 isn't as memory hungry anymore as in 8 and virtually artefact free. I'd be glad if this was the case, but I'll take this statement with a grain of salt until I've seen prove for it.

Overall Vue 9 might finally be what we've all been waiting for. Although it was still in beta the software didn't crash during any of the presentations that I saw which is a good sign. If you're looking for a bunch of new features Vue 9 isn't probably worth an upgrade at all, at least as far as I have seen so far. But if e-on makes a very stable version for the first time then it's probably worth the money.

Should have asked them if they were working on procedural erosion. Beleave it or not this is one thing keeping me from using Vue. I thought the rocky mountain fractal was like the rockies in the US or like the Alpine Shader in Terragen 2 which sort of has a faked erosion but sadly is not pluggable to change that feature so the faked erosion always looks the same.

I know what you mean, but I am pretty sure that we won't see procedural erosion in Vue or Terragen any time soon. As a frequent (but silent) reader of the Planetside forums I remember a thread where Oshyan said that Procedural erosion is not possible yet, because the amount of necessary calculations would bring even Pixars workstations down to their knees. Just think about how long a single erosion operation in Geocontrol 2 or Worldmachine 2 lasts - up to several minutes on really fast PCs. Now think about what that meant for procedural erosions as opposed to those bitmap based erosion operations. Rendertimes would rocket into the sky. I think that e-on is doing research on that kind of stuff, but it's just too complex for PCs in the year 2010 ;-).

There was this person by the name of Dymytry who made a procedural erosion plugin for MojoWorld some time back but it was never released to the public sad to say. He did a volumetric cloud plugin as well, yet that was made public. Last i heard it was going to be implimented into Houdini but weather it made it into the 11 release is unknown. He figured it out and i am sure he is not the only one. There was an article i had come across a year back about planet wide procedural forests as well but for the life of me i did not save that web page. I think it's just a matter of coming up with some cleaver code more the needing a powerful PC. That wiz kid proved that on a plug-in that is new a few years old.

Well, there may be a reason it was never released.  It might have been too slow, or maybe it didn't actually work.  Maybe he decided us peons didn't deserve such wonder.

Attached Link: http://dmytry.pandromeda.com/mojoworld/erosion_fractal/home.html

 every year I've asked them about non-photorealistic cartoon rendering (not talking about black lines around the whole object python script either) and yes I know it can be done in any version of vue if you change each material bit by bit.
I think there are lots of people who would try and make comics with their poser people in vue if vue had easy one click scene tooning.
They always promise me that it will come but it never does!  I sure hope that vue 9 has it.
Love esther

Quote - I am converting the taped presentations right now. Since I want to upload them in Full HD for best viewing quality it will take my poor Notebook the whole day to finish converting. So expect to see the videos on Youtube tomorrow.

thanks

when you post on youtube can you post a link to the video here?

Quote -  Perhaps this is the guy you are referring to?

Yes, the same one.

Yes, I will post the links of course :-)

Unfortunately it will take a couple more days until you get to see the presentations. The videos were too long for Youtube, so I have to reencode them.

Estherau
hell yes I'd love a cartoon RENDER setting :)

I model with Rhino, it has the PENGUNn rendrerer for doign such, I did this ship info card with the demo version,
simple, as I had to erase all the damn lines the demo verison puts over the image, lol, but you get the idea (it can do much better than this of course)

couple of others
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/sj/dragonfly/dragonfly_35_line_b.jpg
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/sj/manowar/manowar_battledeck2.png

:)

 there are a few toon renderers where one can just erase the lines because outlines go all over the edges of the transmaps.  That looks neat.  But I still maintain for doing thousands of comic panels you need easy tooning really.
I wonder if they will put tooning into vue 9?

Oh I agree :) Sometimes I much preffer a cartooned image, oddly enough

With Rhino, it's a seperate renderer, you can set styles to taste, bingo! instant tooning without having to mess with materials etc

with such renders it's often best to do them EXTREMELY large, so the lines look better (thinner and neater), in postwork you can reduce image size

Videos are online. Thanks to Michel for uploading :)

What's new in Vue 9

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekDXjfwDWR8

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fwQlxMzcEg

LumenRT & Carbon Scatter

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TzVL9ws0Wg

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4_g5YfYR0w

Thanks Daniel (and Michel) :-)

Cool :D Thx for the Videos!

Mazak

thanks, much appreciated
  :)
the mulilight system is awesome, woot! 

and avoiding strectched polygons on terrains, long a real pain, is a great improvement

now we just need particles for WORLD DOMINATION!! :sneaky:

Hey Silverblade, have you checked out Impish`s VueDynamics script for Vue? Respect!

http://www.impworks.co.uk/vue/vue-python-scripts/vuedynamics/

thank you for the videos, very much appreciated :)

The relight panel looks interesting but there is one slider (or two) I would love them to add before the final release : one for the sky contribution and one for radiosity contribution (I I do understand the way it works internally, each light source is a layer and they are composited on the fly (additive mode) to allow for the relighting, so, my suggestion should be easily feasible. I know, if not it can also be done by rendering to exr and using a compositing software but why make things complicated when they can be easy :)

I will post the same message in the e-on forum in hope they find it worth implementing :)

Also very intrigued by the various "scale" gizmos in the viewports and the remeshing functionality (if it means, go crazy with your sculpting, press a button, you get a clean topology, then sounds nice.

Oh, and btw, not related, but nice presentation, I always enjoy seeing how the various "gurus" can be so humble when they talk :)

Eonite
hm interesting!! :)