Thanks for feedback, however :( its gist.

I've definitely got mixed feelings about having gotten it, and I did so after I called e-on pointing out that their "minimum" requirements were false advertising: a Pentium 4? They didn't mention that one couldn't do animation on that system alone. Even some users with far less dinosaur systems like mine -- they have i7 quadcores -- barely eek out any animations.

But the lure of being able to create my own "scenes" from scratch since I cannot afford much of anything at all (stock footage or shooting, etc.) made me go for it early Feb. this year. That said, I'm still waffling on selling it.

My only very slim hope would be to shelve use of it and wait a few years when 6 to 8 ro ? cores or more are as consumer market available as quads are now. Probably pink-colored viewpoint there too for no standalone can really do animations.

At least not in 2010. Maybe in 5 years there will be some breakthrough where 3D polygons will be as easy to render as 3D bitmaps.

So as someone suggested to me, perhaps it would be wiser to sell it and put the money towards slowly saving up for a new system first.

On the other hand...

As you mentioned, still art is OK. I rendered a pretty large panoramic 360 degree spectral shot and it didn't take forever. I could mimic video with Ken Burns panning of a series of key stills from an animation to make it look like it's a 3D sequence.

And it is fun being able to create and travel around a 3D landscape.

So, again, mixed feelings.
Situation: unresolved :)

P.S.: Oh, and since I have Particleillusion, I can also toss in some motion of clouds, water and other stuff to give the illusion of it being 3D.

As people have pointed out here at this forum periodically when subjects of apps and equipment come up, it's not always what one has that matters as much as what one does with it (creative application irregardless of budget or platform restraints).

It's kind of like the Pink Floyd album "Dark Side of the Moon" or the Beatles "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band": still considered some of the best sound-engineered/arranged albums of all time, yet done with what would be considered caveman tools compared to today's digital applications.

I can do more on my old Pentium D standalone in terms of sound engineering than Alan Parsons had in PF's entire studio.
Ditto for all of us in terms of video/film with modern NLEs, too :)

> So as someone suggested to me, perhaps it would be wiser to sell it and put the money towards slowly saving up for a new system first.

... slowly saving for a new system? Vue 8 Infinite is US$895! You could buy a screaming new QuadCore for that kind of money. I assume you bought one of the lower priced versions. ;-)

IMHO, there is no decision to be made. With all due respect, a single core Pentium D is ancient technology by today's standard. 3D applications really do make good use of multi-core systems. Dual Cores are old and Quad Cores are about to become yesterday's technology as the new Six Core systems have just been announced. I would not buy any more software without first upgrading to a modern PC (where "modern" is at least a QuadCore which you can get for as low as $599 these days). You will see a huge difference in performance.

I just upgraded from Vue 6 Infinite to Vue 8 Infinite (I skipped 7 because it was too much money for too little new function) and the rendering times have improved but I do have a Quad Core. The primary driver for my upgrade was that Vue 6 didn't support Windows 7. :( Otherwise I might have held out even longer. It's a great piece of software but you need some serious CPU cycles to use it for animation.

~jr

I've used Vue 7.0 last year in a computer graphics animated video for a client. You can see it at:

mms://stream01.csi.it/streamregpie/published/streamregpie_direttaweb/convegno_ambiente_2008_07_01/VIDEO_AMBIENTE_DEF.wmv

Sorry, voiceover and text are in italian...

So, making this video was really a pain, because Vue on one hand is a nice piece of software which allows you to build quite easily wonderful landscapes (simply impossible to achive with other softwares), but on the other hand, as FishEyes said, it is not so suitable for animations due to its slowness and flickering/grain/aliasing and other artifacts you can see in the video above. The only way to reduce such artifacts is to pump up the rendering quality parameters almost to their maximum values, but this way Vue takes VERY VERY long to complete each frame (and some artifacts still remain...).

Don't get me wrong: I like very much this app and what you can do with it, and I do know a tipical nature scene contains billions of polygons so reducing aliasing and flickering is not so easy... (one solution is to rendering only half frames, say even ones, and to interpolate the other half with motion estimation techniques, for example with After Effects or Nuke: this way you cut by 50% rendering times, but such process can lead to other artifacts and works well only if objects and camera movements are very smooth from one frame to the next one).

However, I don't agree with FishEyes about Vue's future: I don't think e-on software will sell it.

Bye.

Thanks for input, John.

And, yes, you were right, I got Vue Complete, not the higher versions. I also got it at Safe Harbor for about $510. Technically, I only paid $300 since I'm dealing with Social Security SSI due to what they call resources limits; had I not bought it, the SSA would have taken $200 away from me anyway (yeah, way OT, so won't belabor this - lol).
Still a lot of money to shell out and I'm still not sure it was the right move, but... I sure am having fun with just learning the ropes of Vue (still images only). I've wanted to get into that stuff for years but felt intimidated, and... I was/am still learning to master Vegas and video.

I'm pretty frugal (some Scottish genes) and so by the end of the year, I'll probably have saved enough to compensate for that large expense.

And then, there is Ultimate S that you and I have been discussing by email. Ah, money, money, money, and creative toys, toys, toys. Gotta be wise with money, but one can't create cool stuff without letting some of it go, either - lol.

mazreds,

I had a hard time viewing your clip due to low stream power and inability to buffer on pause, so I gave up. I'd suggest you put it up at Vimeo or YouTube, or park it as a Flash file at your website if you have one.

I'd like to see it, and, believe it or not, I can understand the voice-over: I was born and raised in Europe and grew up in part in Rome before my teens (viva Lazio - lol). So I learned Italian as a young child mostly by osmosis, as most kids do. Rusty now after years of non-use, but still there.

Ciao.

OK, if you want to see it, then try:

http://videocommunity.csi.it/storico/video_volo_ambiente/VIDEO_AMBIENTE_DEF.wmv

This is progressive download, so all you have to do is wait till your player's buffer is full (or till the entire video has been downloaded, it's only a matter of time).

Nice to hear you understand italian !!!

Ciao.

mazreds,

Well, I finally just downloaded and saw your Piemonte video on my computer. Nice work, though you must have used a render farm for all the 3D sequences -- there is no way one computer could render all that -- unless it took months of rendering! :)

I have two questions:

A) Did you actually map/recreate some of the real Piemonte area, such from geological 3D files, or were these facsimile you created in Vue? If you did use maps/images, what format did you use to import them into Vue?

B) At 06:16 in the video, you have a short sequence of trees around a pond. That kind of scene fits into what I'm planning to do. Did you created that -- or is it a sample file or third party scene you worked on? I'd love to have something like that.
____________

PS: Oh, and about understanding the voice-over: yes, lo ho capito in general quite well, but there are some technical words that I didn't. But then, it is presentation meant for administrative/industrial audience, not someone who parlava in Italian as a ragazzo :)

Yes, you are right. I've used a renderfarm of about 16 machines. Without it, I would still be here to wait for the first scene to complete...

A) We recreated a real Piemonte area (in particular, the one around a city called "Ivrea") basing on DEM elevation data format, which worked great in Vue. The area was about 40 Km x 40 Km wide

B) We created it. You can download the pond scene project at:

http://videocommunity.csi.it/storico/video_volo_ambiente/lago_v2_10.vue

The scene is quite big due to the presence of the entire area map: of course, you can discard it, if you do not want it.

And yes, you are right about the target audience of the presentation, too: it is a technical/administrative audience, not a "ragazzo", a common man one.

Bye.

Thanks for reply, additional info, and for the .vue scene (for a newbie like me, this is invaluable study-work material :)

Something I found....

It's not done in Vue but 3DMax and other apps, but shows how even low-budget, student work can result in something soulfully simple. Yes, it has its animation limitations and one could pick at details, and it doesn't have the adrenaline/speed plot speed addiction of most American stuff, but it's definitely got heart and soul.

As per description by author/s at ShareCG where I first found it:

"In an abandoned city before a tropical storm, a woman decides to stay...

(Oh, and I promised I'd share this with you guys when I left a comment for them.
Gotta keep my word :)



NOTE: This CG short was NOT done with Vue, but with some work and plenty of hardware, one could come pretty close.

our ambition was to portray a particular ambiance and feeling more than a heavy storyline.

Thats exactly what you did in a very different and beautiful way.

Very nice work!

I use VUE6 Infinite. You can see some of the Renditions on my website.
I will prepare a comment about my experiences good/bad with the software later.
http://universeabovetheearth.com/default.html

Great Video.

A little misleading for this thread because 3D STUDIO MAX was the real software behind the video.

There is no comparison between MAX and Vue.

Nonetheless, awesome CG work.

mark2929,

You said, "Thats exactly what you did in a very different and beautiful way. Very nice work!." Well, as I clearly stated, this is not my work. What your were expounding on was the authors' description and work :)

leonardom

I'll check out your site. While the version that I have Vue Complete 8 isn't exactly a toy either, your version is the pro and step above it.

FishEyes,

I did clearly state in my first sentence that it was not done with Vue, so no mislead there. That said, I just added a little note under the clip to remove any doubts.

As far as 3D Max vs. Vue, I'm not going argue there, the price tag alone spells it out :) But I'm pretty sure one could come up with something like this in Vue -- with a lot of work and hardware firepower (render farm). And bugs/glitches not withstanding.

Hey Sonic light

You said the film maker wanted it shown I left the comments for them.

I left a QUOTE above it to make it clear..

I'm following this thread because I too am interested in Vue and downloaded the free version cant see much hope for it though without a render farm maybe useful for quick establishing shots .

Mark

I meant is was misleading to the thread. No bad on your part even more clear since you revised.

Vue is awesome for stills especially when touched up in photoshop.

Vue's animation ability and quality is sorely lacking and it's price tag is getting closer to 3DS all the time. So watch out. I've spent weeks on shadow anomalies with vue.
3DS shadows are sublime.

Check out Terragen...
http://www.planetside.co.uk/
T2 for 299.00 with 3 render node licenses.
Check the resources page for plug-ins

Mark2929,

I appreciate your generosity of spirit, but I don't think/know if the authors are members here, so they probably won't see it. I just told them I'd do it out my own admiration :)

On my diving into 3D overall, I want to incorporate human figures/characters, I just downloaded and installed the free DAZ Studio 3.0. While I'll need to get a couple of morphs for photo-realism and learn the ropes more, I imported a basic static character into Vue as an .obj file with decent results.

FishEyes,

As a mentioned above somewhere, I could only barely afford Vue and that's with a decent discount at that (around $500 for Vue Complete) -- 3DS is totally out of range. Unless I play the Lotto, which I don't - lol.

JWCarney,

I've been aware of and considered Terragen and similar which are cheaper, but the render times on these are way worse than Vue (which can be adjusted) because of spectral and other stuff. For my purposes (so far mainly Flash, i.e. 512x288), I can cut some corners and still have it come out look pretty cool.

One day, maybe even animate some stuff... One thing I may do in the near future is let my system render overnight to make 1-second animations at 2x or 4x realistic speed; then import into Vegas and run at .5 or .25.

That's what I do with most of the particle .pngs from Particleillusion due to that I like mellow, slower-motion effects that I can't adjust any slower in PI. In short, I have to work around the limitations I have. When the day comes where I can upgrade my system, I'll have at least mastered 3D sufficiently to be ready to go to the next level.

P.S. to All:

Thanks again for all of your participation in this thread.
I wasn't expecting it to grow beyond a couple of replies.
Just goes to show how cool this community is, IMO :)

I've had Vue since version 2. Now have 8 Inf.
Absolutely brilliant software and it comes free with a 5 node renderfarm licence.

I have 2 older PC's (Core 2 & P4 plus a Macbook Pro) and of course my main i7.

While there are bugs particularly when rendering, the Vue help staff are the best of any software manufacturer I have come across. I don't have any maintenance plan but typically get a 1 day initial response time.

What you can do with Vue Inf is absolutely astounding, truly mind bogling.
I have to use low res (640x352) because my farm is so small, but when imported, Vegas takes care of whatever resolution I use and prioduces stuff I am quite happy with.

My P4 is practically useless on the farm but still does a little bit of work, the i7 does 50% (running the Vue renderCow background app) and the Core 2 and MacBook Pro do about 25% each. The P4 comes in at about 6%.

The trick is to not to use all the really nice Spectral and Global Radiosity atmospheres if you want fast render times.