btw

render time w/ my settings....

two 20 second sequences at 30fps, then we stretched them to 30 seconds in premier.

each series took about 48hrs on my machine.  I have a Boxx at work... its got 4 processors and 3gigs of RAM.  VUE crashed on me constantly even w/ all that.  And it crashed when I tried to render to the farm... so then I got the beta 10 update for VUE5i right after it was released and i can now render to the farm with the issues I mentioned above.  But Vue still crashes a lot, not as much as before.  but I generally avoid pressing the undo button at all cost... never know if it will work or just crash it - 90% of the time it crashes it.

in the update for Vue 5i called version 9.05 or something, there was a memory leak when you render to screen... so if you have that version, I suggest rendering in the main vue only, not to screen... may increase stability if you have that issue. 

VUE and I have major issues right now in our relationship.  My 5 cows seem to milk quite slowly, and since VUE in its infinite wisdom (pun intended) decided that one should have to be logged onto the computer in order for it to be used in the farm, instead of just having it run as a service in the background like VIZ or Max... well, now I have to run and log in to every computer I want to use for Hypervue render farming.  And if a coworker beats me to work in the morning and logs me off and then logs in, all the supposed .jpgs in the form of .tmp files that computer rendered are unable to be converted to real and official .jpgs by VUE.  THIS IS THE SERIOUS DRAWBACK TO USING VUE IN A PROFESSIONAL OFFICE SETTING.

here's something I did with the settings described above.  http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/media/folder_7/file_341714.jpg

We did have issues when it's played... projected huge on a screen in our conference room it looked very pixelated, washed out, and crappy.

On our large TV monitor in our conference room it looked pretty big and pretty darn good, crisp, clear, and maybe too color saturated.

On my decent computer screen... no bad at all!  But in all cases, we decided that we need to do something to decrease the 'sparkels' or 'pixelation' effect that really can't be seen much in the still, but in the video is obvious, but only annoying on the projection screen.  Problem w/ increasing the aa is that render times seem to increase seriously.

Color reproduction of the same DVD on all those mediums was incredibly and disturbingly diverse.

My advice to Architectural firms looking into using VUE5i?  Wait for VUE6i... or use MAX and teh xstream plugin... that would be the option we would have used, but we use VIZ2006, not max 7 or 8, and so the xstream plugin doesn't work w/ VIZ yet... they say it is in the works 'someday'.  Plus, they are only useful if you are using the Mental Ray render engin in MAX.

all the best,

Fletch

that sucks.  sorry... I guess you're a ... err... deadman.

Hein,

Bruno, I really appreciate you taking time to respond.  Yes, I am well aware of the ability to rotate the image 90 degrees.

Hein, thank you for reading my question thoroughly.  And even more - thanks for giving me the answer!  Awesome!  How did you find this out?  I suppose it's in the manual and I just am too lazy or stupid to read it thoroughly enough to find this answer... sighhhhh.

I use global ambient for architectural exterior fly-arounds and it's plenty good for our clients.  the wind looks great.  I do use antialias on the objects, but not the texture.  Basically I import the broadcast settings into the 'user settings' then I turn off motion blur, and texture antialias, blurred reflections, maybe drop the number of glass refractions down to 5... but then I am rendering as 720x540 pixels and of course HDRI or Radiosity or even GI would look even better, but what I produce already makes my boss and clients and co-workers quite impressed.

Belino's work is far beyond what I need as an architect... but they are incredible clips and very very very well done.  My bosses don't want the fancy camera jiggles and spins, but then, I'm focusing on architecture, not on 'looky what I can do w/ this camera'.  My hat's off to Belino.. .and I look forward to what he will produce in the future.  his 'tests' show me that theoretically one could produce an impressive animated movie on one's home computer using only the tools he does.

fascinating concept... I'd be interested to learn some more details of how this would work, Cheers, if you could explain a bit more in detail for us tech-savvy-yet-apparently-not-tech-savvy-enough people. 

Fletch

thanks a ton for your tips,

so a volumetric metablob can be animated?  I want the puffy clouds to morph and roll by...

maybe if it's not in the atmosphere settings for the clouds I'm not going to fight w/ it... the point of buying VUE was simplicity, not complication... if I wanted to fight w/ a program I'd go back to using VIZ 2006.  :)

dead,

I had the same problem...  it crashed on me when opening it over and over... a re-install should fix it... but...

if you are able to click on the 'show tutorials' button before it disappears, then go to File>options and reset your open GL in VUE to 'software' or turn it off ... then close out and re-open ... hey, I dunno, but it worked for me...

then I just turned OpenGL back to Hardware Accel... after it opened fine.

bizaar but true.

btw - VUE has crashed on me over 95% of the time I've ever used it.  All I can say is - save often!

jc,

that sounds cool, but I'm having trouble enough just controlling the density with a grayscale .png... give me another year to get really comfy in VUE before I start messing w/ splitting the RGB channels to run multiple ecosystems... but I grasp the concept  :) cool idea.

Bruno, My understanding from the debevec.org site was that they aren't taken at different exposures at different moments of the day and combined as a single HDR image.  The are a highly detailed info-laden panaramic photo taken from one spot at a single point in time.  The way some take it is by pointing their camera at a mirrored ball on a tripod.  Then going to the other side of the ball and taking another photo then stiching the two together in a special (freely available on the web) program that makes a single HDRI image which appears like a warped sphere.... but when it's reflected on your object or windows in your scene looks scary-realistic.  It doesn't carry multiple times of day in the same HDR image.

good so far... keep going...  lights in the big robot's face or body perhaps?... or the rocket ship?

thanks bobby... it does work well... I've done it several times... it's just that moving the density image w/in the 'border' of your terrain, and scaling the map to fit the terrain properly is difficult... actually I was applying the material w/ the density map to planes on a certain 'layer' in my .3ds file... I'm wondering if there's a quick way to get the map to scale itself to fit the extents of the planes on that layer.

Eagle... you will find that lighting on the alpha plane may look a bit off from the rest of the scene... you can either adjust your original image, or you can disregard the lights for that alpha plane and set it's illumination higher than 100%.  black robert from Poland has some great info on his website... http://www.graphique3d.republika.pl/

he has a nice tutorial about how he put his great VUE scenes together.  ... part of it is on his alpha plane sky settings.

all are correct... but it's trying get the scale and angle right using the UV map that is nooooo fun in vue.

I apply ecosystems (like the lush grass for instance) and then use the variable density map to help cut down on the polygons in the scene... but getting this thing to line up w/ my model's site is killing me!!!

Any tips out there on a quick way to preview the density map on the site and adjust it more easily say in a more interactive way?  thanks

impish,  I tried your script.  It worked!  ...kinda 

Unfortunately I tried importing my 'other camera' into my Vue file where I had already animated a different camera... instead of 'adding' the camera I imported... it 'went haywire' as they say and combined the current animated camera path with the imported camera path to produce what I can only describe as a path that looked much like spaghetti.  But if you want to use the script to import already-animated cameras onto a 'brand new scene's camera' I think it will work beautifully.... but it will ruin any info you already put in the camera in existing scenes... at least as near as I can tell.

I am very impressed w/ your ability to write a script like that... thanks.