Hi Everybody,

I'm considering VuePro as a tool for my architectural Viz Work. Important is the qualty and size of the trees and plants and the quality of the textures generated for the terrains. All assets will be imported in Lightwave or Max. At the moment trees and plants are generated with Treedesigner/Leavesgenerator (www.polas.net) and XFrog (www.greenworks.de). Model size has to be in the 10K-100K poly range. In Lightwave these are multiplied with HDInstance (www.happy-digital.com). Terrainmaps are now a combination of procedurals and handpainted. Very important is that my rendertime for PAL on a Intel 3GHz has to stay beneath 10 minutes per frame. Now I have some questions:

1. what's the size and quality of plants and trees ? How is the setup of exported models. Is it possible to reduce complextity in LW without sacrificing quality ?
2. are terrain maps mapped straight from above ? This could cause problems with steep mountains
3. how is stability when working with large scenes in VuePro
4. how is stability with live connection in LW and MAX ?

I can think of some more but these are the most important. I wont use VuePro for rendering, only for generating some models and maps. I have read past messages and my idea is there are a lot of mixed feelings. So I hope to hear some professional opinions and advice which can support my decision.

Thanks

We have a young friend who is also in the same field you are in, he works in Viz also. We suggested to him Vue 4, but that was before Vue Pro came out. If he was here now, I would definately suggest Vue Pro to him. Also, I am assuming you will be doing animation and this is really the best for that. Can't tell you the size of the plant models, but the quality is exceptional, terrains can be edited by the top and sides, mapping would be I am assuming from the top. Very stable if you have a good computer. The rest unfortunatly I can't answer but someone will. Hope this helped. Sharen

Maybe you try to contact Irene here at RR. She is an architect and uses Vue 4 for her visualizations. Well, to use Vue Pro as a modeling program only is new here. Not really the strength of the software. Rendering is what it's all about. Have you looked at a program like Onyx TreePro? Trees in all quality levels you want. But the models can become really huge. I did a conifer where the 3ds model was more than 200 MB big. To be honest, i wouldn't do it. One reason is, that i don't think that your spec 10-100K for a quality tree can be reached at all! Whatever software you are using. Probably with mapped trees - isn't there a big collection of vegetation images for architectual needs available? I think so. But i can be wrong. Good luck in your research!

Hi and thanks for your answers till now.

To state things more clearly: I want to use VuePro ONLY for its trees/plants and the terrains, more specifically...the maps. Rendering will always be in LW or MAX since they are simply much faster, especially when doing complex char. or forensic animations. I have a lot of image collections with trees but they are only usefull if doing stills. For animation purposes I definitely need 3D trees and I know from Treedesigner and XFrog you can get perfect trees below 100K. And if you remove the "inside" of the tree carefully you can easily get a perfect 30K tree. Onyx does not add to the two others I mentioned here, except for animation studies in MAX and ElectricImage; selecting branches with accomp.leaves is hell in OnyxTree too.

If you want to do Vue vegetation & scenery I would heartily recommend rendering in Vue followed by compositing. Luckily Vue Pro has good camera/lighting synchronisation. Exported vegetation takes ages to render in LW.

I do professional graphics work including small and large scale engineering projects. Vue is ideal for rendering stills of proposed constructions "in situ" but I'm 100% in agreement with wabe: Vue does not model well. For terrains and plants for use in other programs try Carrara's terrain & plant features especially as the latest version (studio 3) also has UV mapping built in. This takes more time but gives more scope to get exactly what you want, especially the mapping. Hope this helps.

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com/carrara/product_intro_car3.jsp

Thanks all for your opinions. It seems VuePro's trees are way too complex for exporting or simplifiyng. I'll stick with my current tools untill some demo materials are coming. Carrara: nice product, bad trees!!!