Quote - I would rule out the 690 the AMD Radeon 7970 6GB OC special edition versions for two reasons, firstly very few people will use these card, so it won't be used to test software making you more likely to experience issues with it, secondly they are poor value for money. AMD and NVidia will presumably update their FirePro and Quadro series GPUs sometime in the next year, save the money in case it is a must have update!

The compute functions in NVidia consumer cards are intentionally crippled, they want you to buy a Quadro!

Vue 10.5 does not use the GPU for rendering, with the possible exception of some use for Anti-aliasing. Vue also does not do computations on the GPU in the current release, it only uses OpenGL for the viewport display, so the CUDA OpenCL arguments are irrelevent for Vue. You don't say what other 3D applications you are using, or plan to use, so that may be a factor to consider.

You are probably aware that e-on software have a list of suggested GPUs, you can find this here:

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_10.5_infinite/?page=15

For cards not on this list you should ask e-on software directly.

Regarding the use of GPU processing in Adobe CS6, the information you quote is not quite correct. For AMD cards Adobe CS6 uses OpenCL, for NVidia cards CUDA, there is a very short list of functions where GPU processing is only available on CUDA not on OpenCL. See this link for details.

http://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2012/05/opencl-and-premiere-pro-cs6.html

Personnally, as OpenCL is an open standard, and CUDA is proprietary to NVidia, I would prefer to see OpenCL implementations over CUDA.

For people who spend most or all of their time working with a single applicaiton like Maya, or Houdini, it makes sense to research the best GPU for the app and invest money there rather than in higher performance CPUs. However, for users that are working accross many different applications it may make sense to spend more of the budget on the CPU, which will benefit all applicaitons rather than the GPU, which may only benefit specific apps.

Finally, I find the whole GPU thing is very complex and not at all transparent. You usually can pick sets of benchmarks that favour whatever card you want to favour! I would rather invest money in CPU, where it is easy to see what you are getting, than GPU where you may or may not see any improvements in performance.

Thanks for the reply and details, this helps me too. As stated in post above, you are correct in what I have found out too in there is no clear choice for multiple software use. In regard to what I use at this time, mainly it's Adove CS6 Suite, Poser Pro 2012, Vue Infinite 10.5, and ZBrush.

It seems the 680 will be just fine for what I do from what others have said so I think that is my best choice right now and doesn't cost what the Quadros do. If for some reason it is really bad in rendering and such, then I may consider a workstation card when the new ones come out as you say.

I do plan now to invest the most money in the CPU and may go with duel E5 Xeon 2687 for 16 cores. Take a look at the scores here and what you state about the CPU really stands out in Max and Vue:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-e5-2687w-benchmark-review,3149-8.html

Thanks again for the info, it just gets a little confusing at times on the GPU side of things, but the CPU is really clear. I just didn't want to spend $2-4,000 on a workstation card when that money can be put to better use for the Xeons.

Quote - I thought this was already asked and answered before?  http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2849564

You're correct, I did back in May and got some good advice there too. However, things got real confusing when I started doing research on this and looking at benchmarks on various reviews. Sites such as Toms Hardware says one thing, which others like 3DGuru say something different. It got real confusing going back-and-forth trying to figure out what the FACTS were.

Honestly, I appreciate all the replies and think this thread has hit the nail on the head, there is no clear choice unless you are using just one main software package. In that case simply get the video card they recommend most and you're done. But if you have a workflow that consists of multiple 3D/2D software that's where it becomes hard to make a "best" choice.

Hate to ask again so soon, but I am building my workstation shortly and just wanted to see if there was anything else that may help.

Quote - I've had a AMD Radeon card in my PC for 2 month - Vue had to switch off a few things (like background draw for instance), because it wasn't a Nvidia card.

AMD Radeon cards don't use CUDA - that's a NVIDIA specialty. Radeon cards use something close, but not as strongly supported as CUDA, which is called OpenCL !

After getting the new Nvidia GTX 680 (single GPU) card, Vue works great with this graphic card. It doesn't use the GPU for rendering (CPU), but it supports (since Vue 10 or was it Vue 9 ?) the calculation of Anti-Aliasing using the GPU to speed it up. Important, too, for sure, is the onboard RAM amount. They've got at least 2GB , which will help with displacement-mapping and heavily loaded scenes.

Surely the 690 version (double GPU) is for sure a monster card for speed ! The 680 is already very fast, but logically a twin GPU card like the 690 beats it by huge steps. The fastest card so far - but really expensive !

The now to be released GTX 670 card is just a little weaker then a 680 (first tests shown that), but cost wise it spares you quite a lot of money for barely loosing too much speed compared to a 680 card.

So - 690 is for sure top-notch - but the price with more then a 1000$ is quite something - unless you don't have a problem to spend ...

Sure - Quadro cards are pro cards for CAD or stuff like that - but those are not as versatile in their use and strength with everything 3D (...like running stuff like Skyrim game or others) you like to run on a PC besides 3D software like Vue,3dsmax and such.

Thanks for letting me know about your experience with those cards. I was planning on nVidia so should be good there. Most likely will go with 690 when they are more plentiful.

Can you post a couple of screen shots of your render settings that are setup for the 680 card? Such as the video card memory settings, some high-quality user settings, etc. That would save some time for me to get an idea of what is needed for these cards.

Thanks for the replies. After doing some research, checking the software: Vue, ZBrush, Maya, etc. I am leaning to the nVidia GTX 690 card at this time. According to e-on, the nVidia cards are better with Vue due to some display glitches they have had on the 6000 series. They told me they have not tested a lot with the newer 7970 cards so can't say for sure. The nVidia 680 and 690 I was told should work fine since they know the 500 series is good to use. Not a lot of testing done with those cards, but they seem to recommend nVidia.

Would love to have a professional Quadro 6000 or new Tesla, but those are not in my budget for just a graphics card. I plan to focus on the CPU with at least an i7 3960X or Duel Xeon and 32GB RAM.

Quote - You can group polygons at ZBrush and those groups can be used at poser. Do not group

at poser or use poser's group editor for editing slightly ZBrush created groups...

then rig using poser setup room.

 

Rigging is not so difficult, more important part is giving proper fall off zone or weight-map

at Joint editor...

Since we are on at same time thought I would drop a quick reply.

You are right about the fall off zone/weight map. I have had LOTS of issues getting things working correctly, mostly because Poser is REALLY bad at rigging compared to other programs. In my first rig I had issues where the leg and arm bends would distort the model making them really messed up. Other areas were giving me fits too. The morphs were not working right and seemed to only be OK when done in the "body" area and not individual parts where they sometimes would not work at all.

Any tips, references or help appreciated.

Quote - > Quote - Personally, I have no interest in the "Genesis" model that Daz has put all their efforts into now. It just seems like a poor direction to go and still trying to be everything or a jack-of-all trades. Instead of focusing on a really good female sculpt from the ground up, they are trying this, which I don't care for. In the long run, I think they may offer a high-res V5 model or by then V6, but only if they see lack of sales for their "Genesis" stuff.

Many vendors are still very much supporting V4 and I see a LOT of new characters and even clothing for her coming out weekly. From what I see and hear too is they are waiting to see what Daz will do. Will they simply discontinue their Poser support totally and stay with their "Genesis" or do a combo effort and release versions for each platform (high-res) models?

For me, I have started learning to sculpt and do my own models in ZBrush because it is important for my work flow and not looked back. Once YOU have FULL control of the model, you realise how great it is to custom build it and not make it generic like the "genesis" models trying to be many things.

Read the sticky thread. They spent a couple years working on the tech. It's a way of making it very easy to use all kinds of clothes and characters on one base. They are working on making it work with V3 and M3 clothes which is great news It's also a way to make a high res model using Catmull-Clark that doesn't get messed up like a high res model like V4 and M4 can when you bend it. DAZ and SM are working on trying to get Genesis into Poser.

Yes I saw all that and it is still a VERY poor way of doing things as stated in prior post. This is what you get when doing their sort of jack-of-all trades design and not a good idea at all. Otherwise, things like this would be done long ago by game studios to save time instead of making all their models all from the ground up to achieve the best results. Once you have learned how to do your own custom sculpts and models, their is no substitute.

Personally, I have no interest in the "Genesis" model that Daz has put all their efforts into now. It just seems like a poor direction to go and still trying to be everything or a jack-of-all trades. Instead of focusing on a really good female sculpt from the ground up, they are trying this, which I don't care for. In the long run, I think they may offer a high-res V5 model or by then V6, but only if they see lack of sales for their "Genesis" stuff.

Many vendors are still very much supporting V4 and I see a LOT of new characters and even clothing for her coming out weekly. From what I see and hear too is they are waiting to see what Daz will do. Will they simply discontinue their Poser support totally and stay with their "Genesis" or do a combo effort and release versions for each platform (high-res) models?

For me, I have started learning to sculpt and do my own models in ZBrush because it is important for my work flow and not looked back. Once YOU have FULL control of the model, you realise how great it is to custom build it and not make it generic like the "genesis" models trying to be many things.

volter:

Nice to see the new tutorials, they will help as always I'm sure. In regard to the "snow path" tutorial you did, I was wondering how I could modify it for other snow impressions? In other words, say I have a space ship that crashes into a snow/ice area and want to leave the impression of the ship in the snow. How can I transfer specific shapes of imported objects into snow for impressions?

Look forward to seeing more.

I am also interested in this as I do a LOT of work now using ZBrush 4 and rigging the models as needed. Typically, I work with something universal for the file format but have not tried "Collada". Is that better than trying to simply export "OBJ" or does that format work fine as well for rigged models?

Also, I was wondering about scale for the models. I usually like to create models fairly large, at least much larger than Poser/Daz models. The other reason is I have characters, vehicles, etc. that need scaled for certain scenes as well. So, I was wondering if after importing what is best methods to get the desired scale for the scene? What I am worried about is getting the detail off for the model or creating seams on the texture maps if they are scaled. Is this usually a problem you have to deal with and if so how? Typically, if I import a Daz/Poser figure I don't have problems with textures when scaling a character such as Victoria 4. But I am not sure about custom models and the texture maps.

Quote - Hi all,

I am trying to improt poser figures into a pre-made Vue scene in Vue 8. Whilst the figure imports fine - it is really slow when moving or re-sizing the figure!

Can anyone suggest what would be the best settings for vue while I am trying to add figure to the scene? My Pc should be able to cope alright as I have an AMD Duo 220 ghz processor with 4Gig of Ram and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Graphics card.

I would like to get into Vue more as a hobby - but the constant slowness puts me off using it as much as I would like. Therefore any suggestions for a smoother running would be great.

I was also looking to go from PC to an Apple Desktop - and would be interested to know what anyone thought on this? It would be purely for using Poser/Vue, and is the upgrade from Vue 8 to Vue 9 be worth it?

Thanks all

 

I develop on both PC and Mac platforms so I can help you with anything you need. The first thing I should point out though is your system really is not that good for much detailed work or complex scenes. But, it all depends upon what you plan to do.

My 2008 Mac Pro with 10GB of RAM and an nVidia 8800GT graphics card is now part of my render farm. The main production PC I use is a custom built computer I did using most all the same parts from Maximum PC September 2010 issue. Now, unless you need all that power like me, that may be overkill for what you want. All I was pointing out is that your system really is on the low end though to do much.

Yes, Vue 9 is worth it on several levels, such as having a working Smith Micro SDK for Poser imports. I worked with e-on tech on this for a long time and their latest version appears to have fixed most of the problems I reported. You can find my discussion threads over at e-on for more on this in their "Matainence form" area.

A 64bit OS, great graphics and LOTS of RAM is a must. I develop on both Windows 7 64 and Snow Leopard, which is 64 bit too. Apple Leopard is suppossed to be full 64bit with no option for 32bit like now where you can boot into either one. Until Vue 9, it was REALLY bad on the Mac. Now, this is the first real full version they have done and it works fine for me but there are some problems with it you may not see on Windows 7. I expect it to get better though since this is really their first real Cocoa build.

For now, with what you have, try doing like the other posts say. Also, make sure your video ram setting in prefernces matches what your card can do. Make sure the other settings are set to low for preview and that should help too.

Good luck and happy rendering.

volter:

Looking forward to your ZBrush/Vue tutorials as well. However, I have been able to create full figures and props in ZB 4 to export out into Vue with no trouble. The texturing can be tricky but there are some great official workshops now for ZB they have and it has  helped me a LOT too. I look forward to seeing your methods and how you do things because there is always something to learn.

Quote - > Quote - For some that may be, but I currently have a work flow of Poser Pro 2010, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Vue 9 Infinite, ZBrush 4 and just recently Maya. Most people I have ever worked with use either ZBrush, which is quite reasonable, or a program like Modo, Max or Maya in combo with the oher tools.

Free tutorials are always nice, but for many it is no use because we use more capable programs.

 

 

So  you're saying that those of us who can't afford such programmes don't deserve free tutorials?

 

I never said that in my statement, that is something you have inferred. You should read the exact words as written, otherwise you can make anything be out of context. In fact, I said "Free tutorials are always nice, but for many it is no use because we use more capable programs." which is quite clear.

Quote - Many of us don't have the cash to splash on more expensive modelling programmes - they are out of reach to many.   I use Hexagon and I'm happy with it so I too am grateful for those tutorials

For some that may be, but I currently have a work flow of Poser Pro 2010, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Vue 9 Infinite, ZBrush 4 and just recently Maya. Most people I have ever worked with use either ZBrush, which is quite reasonable, or a program like Modo, Max or Maya in combo with the oher tools.

Free tutorials are always nice, but for many it is no use because we use more capable programs.

I have Vue 9 running the latest EEF update on both Windows 7 64 bit and Mac Snow Leopard.

What I can tell you is Vue 9.x on Windows 7 64bit is very good and a LOT better than 7.x or 8.x versions. If you followed any of my LONG discussion threads here or at e-on on their Matainence forum then you know about all the problems I had with Poser imports. It was so bad that e-on assigned me a tech to work with and I uncovered and documented over 4 known bugs at the time ranging from Poser Shader Tree issues to OOM (Out of Memory) errors at random times. There was nothing that could be done according to Neil at e-on because it was the Smith Micro package causing the problems. He confimed all my reported issues going all the way back to Vue 7.x and reported them to Smith Micro. Now, if you use the latest Smith Micro SDK in Vue 9.x, things appear to be much improved and most of the bugs I reported have not shown up for me from what I have tested it with. There is still a known scaling issue to deal with though and I am working on a couple of others with them.

The other improvements seem to be good too with the terrain editor, handling of clounds, etc. which slowed down before. So basically, I would agree that the Win 7 64bit version is better than before so long as they keep the Smith Micro SDK updated and work with them on the problems.

For the Mac under Snow Leopard, as has been said above, there are a few issues you run into since not everything is 64bit on the Mac side such as the wxpython script and some other minor issues. Overall though, it has been a LOT better than any of the prior attempts at a 64bit Cocoa version and is really the first full 64bit Vue on the Mac. At least now, it is usable for me on the Mac Pro unlike any of the other versions. I am hoping they will give more support to it in the coming versions given how far they have come as of now.

So, both versions I think are indeed improved from 7.x and 8.x in terms of overall quality. But, I would still like to see e-on take at least one year and do nothing but bug fixes and improvements to it for a better program. I can live without any new features for a least that long and I know many I have talked to in production feel the same way.

Happy rendering

grichter:

Thanks for the detailed reply, that worked! In regard to moving the files from the "Material Library" to the "Pose Library", do you just leave the file names like they are or can you rename them "PZ2"? The reason I asked is I am still confused as to how vendors put them in the "Pose" library for their clothing textures. For example, if you look at a clothing texture pack you buy from here, you will see they have all the files in the "Pose" library with "PZ2" file extensions. Of course the actual texture images are in the respective "Textures" directory, but just was not sure how they got them to be "PZ2" files?

Thanks again.