lionhead07 opened this issue on Feb 09, 2012 · 8 posts
penboack posted Sat, 11 February 2012 at 7:12 AM
I am also evaluating Vue (Vue 10 Infinite PLE) together with Terragen 2.
I thought of evaluating XStream, but as my main app is CINEMA 4D, which is incredibly stable, it seemed better to go down the compositing route...
With XStream Vue my understanding from skimming through the reference documentation is that Vue handles the Vue elements of the render, Maya handles its own objects. To allow you to interact with Vue objects in Maya the Vue plug-in creates Maya proxies for Vue objects.
So far my initial impression of Vue are:
The Ecosystem tool and painting is amazing.
Atmospheres are very good, great for sunsets, sunrises, clouds...
Provided you use procedural terrains near the camera the results can be very realistic and with the sculpting tools make both standard and procedural terrains easy to manipulate.
The GUI is very poor, a modern single tabbed window interface like C4D / Houdini / Maya / modo would be much more artist friendly. In particular the modeless dialogs are very dated and require an excess amount of mouse clicking.
It needs much better multi-threading, for example in C4D or Houdini when you render to the Render Picture Viewer continue to work in the main app whilst it is rendering. This is not possible in Vue, you can't even access any of the functionality of the picture view.
It is not very stable (on Mac OS X 10.6.8!
You could also look at Planetside Terragen as an alternative to Vue with the XFrog bundle it is a very interesting package. The free non-commercial edition allows you to render stills upto 800 x 600 with no watermark. Definitely a must try.