I know Vue can do a lot, so I'm thinking of getting it, but I was wondering specifically about the rendering...

If I were to start using Vue...  without even thinking about the terrains and that sort of thing...  Would Vue be a noticeable improvement on renders over poser?

Thanks

Yes, I think the renders look better, but importing adds another step where sometimes things go wrong.  A very complex poser scene will slow down your vue if you chose to keep poser textures.  If you don't keep poser textures things often look quite good but sometimes you have to adjust bump and shinyness.

Love esther

PS I will often render an HDRI in vue and map it to a dome in poser for landscapes.

Quote - Yes, I think the renders look better, but importing adds another step where sometimes things go wrong.  A very complex poser scene will slow down your vue if you chose to keep poser textures.  If you don't keep poser textures things often look quite good but sometimes you have to adjust bump and shinyness.

Love esther

PS I will often render an HDRI in vue and map it to a dome in poser for landscapes.

Thanks, Esther.  I went ahead and downloaded the PLE to play with.  I was able to import a poser scene and render it.  Looks a little weird, but I don't really know what I'm doing yet.  :-)

feel free to show us.

I use poser 7 for general setup of scenes and clothing and posing figures, then import them into Vue 8 (complete) for rendering final images.  Vue's render engine is just sooo much better.   Yes, textures always seem to need a bit of tweaking, but well worth the effort!

Vues lighting is much better than Posers, that's where you will see the main difference, true GR and GI instead of faked and the big thing also is that it is a full 64 bit app which poser isn't. On that note, Vue works best if you have a ton of RAM to play with. I have 8 Gig at the moment but I'm going up to 16 soon [hopefully].

Don't misinterpret that last bit, Vue as Vue only will work just fine with small amounts of RAM, but importing large Poser files with large textures will need more.

the other good thing about the lights is it is easy to see them, move them around and make them shine or cast shadows on whatever you like.

Poser you are lucky to even see the light to move it anywhere.

Love esther

Without wanting to start a war about bias, do you Guys not think that Vue has a pretty steep learning curve?

Lighting is ten fold easier to set up in Vue, positioning the sun or moving the lights objects is very straight-forward.
Besides that Vue has a preview render, which in one or two passes (usually few seconds) lets you tell if the lighting is wrong or you're on the right track. The render quality as such is low in the preview, but it is just supposed to be, exactly, a preview.
Lower render settings in Poser means throwing away raytracing and other lighting essentials (forgive me if I'm mistaken - I have made some OK renders with the Firefly engine, but I'm certainly no expert...), and that makes it difficult/impossible to estimate the appearance, without having to wait for it.

There are different approaches to handling the import to Vue. I personally prefer NOT to use the Poser shader tree, it's a huge resource hog. Actually I export to Collada mostly, and scale down the texure maps at the same time. If you decide to use the full resolution maps after all, you can import them in Vue.
The non-shader, collada approach means some tweaking of the texures in Vue (specular, bumps etc.) but I like that, gives me a great deal of control over the appearance. That's just my approach, it's neither right nor wrong :)

Quote - Without wanting to start a war about bias, do you Guys not think that Vue has a pretty steep learning curve?

Wrong. IMHO Vue is one of the easiest 3D applications to learn. I started with 3D using  Bryce and Poser, but soon made the shift to Vue 4, and it was so much easier and powerful than Bryce 5.
Now, if you compare Bryce (7 Pro) and Vue (Complete or Infinite) today, there's just no comparison. Well, not in the pricing either true enough. Bryce is cheap, but so are the results possible with it.
Visit the respective galleries, if you doubt me...

within 5 minutes of playing with vue I could make a nice looking scene.  even my kids can.

Love esther

Without wanting to start a war about bias, do you Guys not think that Vue has a pretty steep learning curve?

Chris, It's fairly intuitive to use and tha lights are far easier to use than Posers are by a long way. If there is anything that has a learning curve, it would be the "Function Editor", now that can be as simple or as complex as you like and to use it properly does take some time and effort to learn IMO. That said I hardly ever use it myself, I can't speak for the others though.

If there is anything that has a learning curve, it would be the "Function Editor", now that can be as simple or as complex as you like and to use it properly does take some time and effort to learn IMO.

I don't know of anyone who loves the Vue function editor, but I know a few who hate it. That includes me :)
But it's a sort love-hate relationship, because it's a very strong tool, if you have the patience and stubbornness to get (some) grip on it.

Thanks for all of the feedback, everybody.

Is there a sweet spot for memory on Vue?  I have 4gb now, but I'm thinking of adding another 8gb.  Poser's only 32 bits on the mac, so the 4gb is all I can use so far.

I would have to echo some comments above. For me, setting a scene in Poser and using in Vue was easier to light. For some reason, I just like the lights/lighting better in Vue.

Quote - Without wanting to start a war about bias, do you Guys not think that Vue has a pretty steep learning curve?

I'd say it does if you are doing the multi-pass rendering for compositing on other apps.  And also if you are using the xStream vesions with Maya and 3DS, etc.  Lots of trial and error involved.

The stand-alone version of Vue still requires a good amount of learning of the material editor if you want to make your own terrain textures (fractals and such).  I just use the included textures and then tweak them.  The rest of learning Vue was second nature to me.

As for Poser importing into Vue, the rule of thumb is to have 500MB RAM for each hi-res clothed V4 figure in your Vue scene.  Running Poser+Vue=huge resource usage.

Thank you all for your replies.  I'm afraid I didn't find Vue intuitive at all. I'm too hooked on Bryce I guess.

people do get used to one type of interface.

As long as it does everything you need, and doesn't crash every 5 seconds that is the main thing.

Love esther

1. I used to use Bryce, it's a lovely app, but Vue is much better IMHO :)
   Sorry Bryster, once you willingly adapt, it's superb (#2), but you love Bryce...so that will stop you (normal psychology, your love of bryce is quite reasonable but such always gets in the way, hey, did for me, lol).
   Some things are very similar between Vue and Bryce, so for me, learning Vue was easy (#3)

2. Yeah the deep functions are complex, but I enjoyed or used to, working in the function editor, as there's so damn much you can do in there, like my "dirt materials" :)
   the "node based" system in Vue utterly blows away the maddeningly abstract and frankly dumb Bryce Deep material editor :/
   Alas nowadays, headaches etc make such a chore at best for me, sigh (that is, creating/discovering new stuff based on mucking around in function editor, so I've about given up on that, regretfully)

3. We've all got biases, all got likes. There is no "best" app, only one you enjoy using the most, OR that is necessary for your task at hand.
   However, undue bias can stop folk picking up new stuff which is bad. I saw Vue as a "competitor for my beloved Bryce, grrr!" back in the day, hehe ;)

However, after Bryce got left in the doldrums by SCUMBAG CORPORATIONS, grr! ()
bryce got sold off and left to rot while other apps advanced, so I reluctanlty tried Vue after some years...and found it outstanding.
() gah, I loathe bean counting, pencil pushing, inuhuman corporations, worst damn menace we've ever created /rant mode off, hehe...

1. Please see my many tutorials on Poser imports, Vue lighting, materials etc :)
   the key is in how you import the materials and set them up for ANY APP, as native material systems nearly always come out a hell of a lot better. ie, say you import to Ligthwave, and you had an applet that if you wish could use the psoer mateirals in Lightwave, they'd suck, versus converting them to Ligthwave materials as the apps innate systems work much better, and Poser's rendering etc is woeful.

So, for Vue, when import, do NOT use "Import as Poser materials", 99% of time they are garbage compared to taking time to tweak them in Vue.

My tutorial index

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/index.htm

Vue lighting
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html

Optimizing Poser imports
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/18.html

this is one of my own renders of Poser imported character :)

I used Bryce 5 for years.  Had the DAZ Studio bridge for it when I used to use DAZ Studio back in the day.  Never could figured out its material editor.  But I never looked at the manual since I could figure out everything else in Bryce.  I still love its terrain editor for making game maps with.  But Vue gives me better realtime previewing and the top/side/front views of scenes while working in it.

I don't export from Vue.  My models are all imported into Vue.  Vue is the stopping point for most of my projects.

Best way to learn Vue is to open the sample scenes and poke around in them to see how objects at labeled, grouped, textured, hidden or not, positioned in a scene, etc.  Then start looking at how the clouds are set in the scene and what parameters they use.  Then look at the light sources to see what kinds of lights are in the scene and how they are positioned and aimed and things.  Then look at the environment as far as how lighting will affect it and how the render will act on it.  All my Vue scens use the GR lighting (best) and I use User settings for my rendering (also set on highest for object AA). 

Check out the Vue gallery until you see a render you like.  Then find out how it was done.  That's what I do.  If you don't find a Vue render that you like at all, then Vue won't be your thing.  Both of my brothers are color-blind and so are not interested at all in rendering as a hobby.  They still play all the video games though.

BTW, I still use my other 3D programs from time to time that can do things easier than Vue can.  But I pretty much render only in Vue because of its outdoor environment sky and lighting.

Quote:-

I don't export from Vue.  My models are all imported into Vue.  Vue is the stopping point for most of my projects.

well if it worked quickly for me and didn't crash and could handle lots of poser textures rendered using poser in vue then I would do that too, but it causes too much pain to make vue my main renderer.

I still could not do without it though.

*...well if it worked quickly for me and didn't crash and could handle lots of poser textures rendered using poser in vue then I would do that too, but it causes too much pain to make vue my main renderer...

*I use the COLLADA export option in Poser most of the time. Lets you scale down the texturemaps, and no detectable figure changes.

do you chose the keep the poser rendering option thingy?

I like that because I toon my people in poser and the tooning stays.  but then vue goes slowly even with my 40+ of ram and my 12 core mac.

Love esther

Tooning in Poser actually changes the textures so that Vue renders then as toon also?

oh yes!!!!!

Did not know that.

yes.  so when I make my comic I will set up one fairly distant shot in vue for the scenery and render in vue.  but you can do closeups of your tooned figure too in vue quite easily.

then I usually just make an HDRI and do the rest in poser as it is quicker for me that way - cuts out the export import step etc.

I'll see if I can come up with a closeup.  But right now I've found something new for tooning in an email from rdna. (which will work fine in vue I am sure)

Love esther

I second most of the opinions above about the Vue render being superior but there is one caveat, it comes at a price. While Poser has no problen with 4000x4000 resolution and even higher, Vue chokes and becomes impractical long before that. Unfortunatly people usually don't publish their render time and resolution in the Gallery but an educated  guess is that 99% are liliput renders. That makes them useless for professional work, where 3000,4000px is at a minimum.

While playing with the PLE, see how Vue renders Poser dynamic hair compaired to how Poser does.  Or were you not going to use Poser figures and just do renders in Vue of everything else?

As I said on the other thread, I do professional work with Vue and render out at over 3000 resolution at 300 dpi without choking. You can't make a sweeping statement like that, it all depends on what is in your scene, and let's face it, those of us that know what we're doing can break it down if needs be and composite it in Photoshop.

Quote - As I said on the other thread, I do professional work with Vue

Sounds cool. You should post them in gallery.

If I did, they would have to be compressed a lot and I can't for most anyway for legal reasons. Some of my cover work can be seen on the publishers website.

You have to sign all sorts of NDA's when doing professional work. Incidentally I don't do enough to make a living at it, just enough for pocket money and to finance purchases of other models I may need.

Why can't I make sweeping statements about Vue when I have used Vue every day for two years, 80 hours a week?

I always do multiple renders and even Multipass and composite it together in Photoshop.

But that is only because I has to. Vue refuse to render my 4000px pictures in reasonable time. Only one render makes for a better result IMO. That is not important as I always postwork in Photoshop and ArtRage, but one render would be preferable and speed up my workflow. It is even more important for people that do not do postwork.

Try to render this simple scene from another thread, atmosphere is physical, the simplest one there is, (Vue 9, 8 MB),
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10255731/RiverCanyon.zip

As for the information about your work, as we can not see it and don't know what it is, in what way is that information useful for us?

Why can't I make sweeping statements about Vue when I have used Vue every day for two years, 80 hours a week?

Simply because each and every time you use it and create something it's different, different atmos, different imports, different levels of detail, the list could go on and on, Sweeping statements are only good if your input is uniform, it isn't!

You can render big images in Vue in reasonable times, but it depends to a great extent on what is in your scene and the quality used.

It's pretty obvious that most home users and hobbyists won't be able to render the Pirates of the Caribbean scenes in a reasonable time for example simply because they won't have the sort of computing power the pros had to do that.

"Simply because each and every time you.."

The best way to have an opinion of something is the simple expedient of compareing with something else. For instance I compare Vue with Poser, Daz and Cinema 4D VRay renders.

Edit: And I forgot to say, Vue is by far the slowest for large resolutions. Not 2x slower or 3x slower but hundreds of times slower, in short there is something wrong with it.

You can't compare Apples with Pears, it's the same with software. You could compare Poser to DS, you could compare Vue with carrara or Bryce. You can't really compare Poser to Vue because they perform quite differently, Poser isn't full 64 bit for example, vue is...

You can't compare a Vue scene with another completely different Vue scene because of all the differences that may be involved, it's like trying to compare a cheap watch with the Space Shuttle, just can't do it.

For fun I will render the RiverCanyon scene on my computer.  It's very old and does not have a GPU to speak of.

Vue is in a panic now.  It says I'm living dangerously and that maybe I should render it to disk.  I said do it anyway and Vue exited on its own without even trying.  I'll try rendering to disk.

Vue is indispensable because it can do something that no other program can do. In all other respect it is most unstable, the buggiest and slowest commercial application I ever seen in my 20 years professional work as a programmer. So what you are saying is that "all over Vue there are lots and lots of bugs but the renderer is perfect". :))) I don't buy it.

Thank you Shawn, I will be indebted to you! I already tried on two different computers but all information is welcome.

Where did I say the renderer is "perfect"???

I don't believe I said that, in fact I "know" I didn't say that..

What I've said is that it's performance is dependant on what you put in, to what you want to get out.

There is no Black and White here, it's all about variables which is why it's not quantifiable.

It's rendering to disk.  1h08' it says is left.  75% resources free.  I guess I'll go read some of my book.