Comparisons to Vue?

[PorcupineFloyd]

Terragen's strength lies in it's procedural approach to everything. You can generate realistic looking planets with complete shaders that cover it's surface. Vue is more local and seem to fake things a lot more than Terragen. If you're into creating quick, small scenes, Vue might offer better performance and control but in my opinion Terragen is way better in creating huge spaces.

Performance: Terragen 2 seems slow compared to Vue, but it's a matter of usual working conditions described above. If you try to build similar scenes in TG2 and Vue, including only procedurals (both terrain and bumps), switch global illumination on and populate the sky with some fat cumulus, you'll see that Terragen can handle it better.

Vue also has a tendency to eat lots of RAM, especially while using procedural bumps or terrains. However - it's more hybrid than TG2 in terms of render engine. You can for example use built-in 2.5D depth of field rendering or simple bump-maps instead of procedural ones.

You might also want to consider the price. If we assume that both software offer similar capabilities, Terragen is 1/10 of the Vue's price (at last it was few months ago).

The best way would be to test both tools and decide which one suits yourself better. If you do lots of postwork, Vue might come very handy with it's G-buffer or multi-pass.

[sjefen]

Hi,

One thing to bear in mind regarding Vue, is that the vegetation can be animated by placing wind forces in your scene...

It's cool, but have you seen any examples which don't look weird? All the ones I have look a bit odd.

Regards,

Jo

I completely agree with this Jo.
It looks like some trolls are standing on the ground shaking the trees. It does not look like wind in what I have seen.

[chromecity]

You might also want to consider the price. If we assume that both software offer similar capabilities, Terragen is 1/10 of the Vue's price (at last it was few months ago).

Then you need to find a better place to buy your software.  Since you are talking similar capabilities, then you obviously have to include animation.  The Pre-Purchase Terragen 2 "Deep" with Animation is $299 as a special offering (which will no doubt increase when it is actually released).  The high-end Vue Infinite product goes for $895.  Both are downloads from their respective companies.  How in the world do you get 1/10 out of that???

It never fails to amaze me how these 'product A vs. B' discussions are always so heavily slanted when discussed within one or the other brand's own forums.  They're both great products, but this type of misinformation doesn't help anybody.

[PorcupineFloyd]

I was comparing Pre-Purchase of Terragen 2 "Deep" without animation to Vue 7 Infinite and that's of course approximated. I've paid like 400 PLN for TG2 without animation and Vue 7 Infinite costs 4477 PLN. I've made a mistake by comparing non-animation version of Terragen with Vue (because that was the version I've pre-ordered) but you have to agree that in my case (Polish retailers) price difference is still significant, even for "Deep" with animation.

What about "choosing sides" while discussing about something:
Can you imagine most users on Planetside forums praising Vue and most users on e-on software's forums praising Terragen? That would be kinda weird considering who uses which forum (and which software for most of the time).

[Mohawk20]

It never fails to amaze me how these 'product A vs. B' discussions are always so heavily slanted when discussed within one or the other brand's own forums.  They're both great products, but this type of misinformation doesn't help anybody.

That's why you should try for yourself, and make up your own mind. On this forum, we only know where TG2 is better than Vue (in our opinion). On the other forums it's the other way around. So overall you should have a good idea of pro's and con's. Then you should try the free versions, and then decide which one to use.

[rcallicotte]

Good advice, Mohawk.

[Jack]

also if you want to pay even more for vue you can get Xstream which is a set of plugins that intergrate into max maya lightwave c4d etc and it does it briliantly in vue 7 you can merge plugins like fumefx afterburn etc seamleslly within xstream then render through mentalray with such ease it is Brilliant i have to admit

[ekholbrook]

Vue 7's strength is that it's an all around decent rendering package that do ecosystems. You can import a poser figure, sprinkle some trees around and render it all out fairly quickly. It has a decent material editor, node editor, decent atmospheres, excellent GUI (one of the few apps I can work comfortably with a 4 panel view).

It's weakness is that is NOT a terrain or landscape program. It's not a scenery program. It can't quite figure out what it wants to be. It has radiosity but it's got so many flaws in the engine it will drive you crazy. It's terrain editor is circa 1990 (Bryce is more advanced IMHO). It sucks "resources" but strangely doesn't use alot of RAM. You'll get Out of Memory errors when it's only using 500 megs of RAM but Vue indicates it's down to %40 resources. This has been a problem that's plagued it for years. It's ecosystem engine is very good and very annoying. It gives you a fair amount of control with ease but (a) it's buggy and unpredictable (save every 10 seconds and you might be safe) and (b) lacks that extra "oomph" control to push it over the edge: Example, it internally lowers the density of planted objects as they approach a 90 degree slope. There's no way to override this. It assumes you want a "normal" hill where things start or stop growing as the slope increases above 60, 70 degrees. Yet it has controls to control the slope vs density. Which works to a point but that internal automatic override still kicks in and lowers the density ontop of what you're own settings do.

It has a decent rendering engine but as someone said here, take two procedural landscapes, put in some "real" clouds, put in some real trees, and hit render, and TG2 will probably be faster.

Vue also has major problems with it's unit system. Again, e-on can't quite figure out what units to use and so they use like Hybrid units that mean very little. One typically will be placing cloud banks at 40 feet high to give the appearance of mountains peaking through the clouds. Totally ridiculous. TG2's ability to work EXACTLY with real world units is it's biggest strength.

The atmosphere in Vue is not real either despite having a new Spectral atmosphere type carried over from V6. It's ok, but again, there's no basis in reality.

Basically Vue is a highly advanced Bryce (with the exception of it's terrain editor). It can do some limited boolean and metablob modeling and as I said, does import Poser and other objects with relative ease. Just be prepared for crashes, OOM errors, weird things like input boxes showing too few digits (ie... you input an origin for a material at 30.50 and the box only shows 0.500 because it can't see the 3. It's there... you just can't see it. This makes life a total nightmare sometimes.

[ekholbrook]

I will add or should add, I've rendered close to 300 images with Vue, starting with 4Pro and have upgrade through to Vue7Infinite. Vue and TG are really two totally different things. If I want to do an actual "Landscape", TG is my choice. Real clouds, real mountains. TG is unfinished though and it keeps me from using it too much. Vue IS a good package. Overpriced now I think and awfully buggy to the point of hair pulling, but it "can" produce stunning results. There are head scratching aspects to the program of why the developers did or didn't do something. But in the end, I do always come back to Vue despite it's flaws. I hate it and love it at the same time. I would love to see TG2 catch up a bit. I want to use it more but certain things are still just not in place to make the big push over to it. Example: I build a castle in my modeling program and want to import it and texture it and place it on a mountain... I'm like "hmmm... TG2 is really a pain in the but to add and work with imported objects and their materials"... So I'll use Vue instead... That's really TG2's main problem for me.

[SilverCity]

Thanks for the nice Vue vs. T2 comparison, ekholbrook. This was very helpful for me.

[rcallicotte]

Yeah.  It'll be interesting over the next year to see how Planetside handles this.

That's really TG2's main problem for me.

[reck]

Yeah.  It'll be interesting over the next year to see how Planetside handles this.

That's really TG2's main problem for me.

I think just removing the texture limit (or greatly increasing it) would solve a lot of frustration with importing objects.

[bobbystahr]

I think just removing the texture limit (or greatly increasing it) would solve a lot of frustration with importing objects.
[/quote]


I must agree.. ...

[Shashin]

I've been using Vue for a little while now, and here's what I've found. Please note, though, I've used Vue alot more than TG2:

Ease-of-Use: Vue (For some reason, at least to me, Vue just feels comfortable when layout out scenes. Perhaps that's partly the GUI, but I can't say for certain. At this stage, though, Vue seems to slightly outweigh TG2 in this aspect)

Stability: Varies (Vue, for smaller renders on a single machine, works fine. My chief gripe is with the renderfarm module, HyperVue. The amount of grief this module has given me (such as failing to connect to other computers due to in-scene texture scales, etc) has really bugged me. That having been said, I've never done an A3 render with TG2, so I can't speak from experience when it comes to that.

Realism: Ughhhh... well... 'it depends' is the best answer I can say at this stage. I've seen some incredible things done in both. But I suppose the question is more along the lines of Global VS Local:

Global: TG2 (TG2 hammers Vue into the ground when trying to create seamless terrains or high-altitude shots. Set up a procedural planet, tweak the atmosphere and place your camera - that's the groundwork done. Whereas with Vue, doing the same thing (again, for me personally) is like pulling teeth. Vue does have procedural terrain objects, but... well, I've not succeeded in making it stretch over the horizon and still look right yet.)

Local: Vue (This seems to be Vue's primary purpose - placing individual mountains and trees to get that 'just-right' postcard look. Or, at least, that's what I use it for.)

Pricetag: *gulp* (Okay... this is a funny one for me. I bought Vue 6 when it was 50% off (which is pretty much what made up my mind to get it in the first place), and, yeah, it's done a fair job. But then Vue 7 came up. To benefit, I had to fork out the same amount ($200USD) that I'd already paid for Vue 6, and I'd only just bought it less than a year earlier (closer to, well, six-eight months). So I'm slightly biased in this regard ~ I almost boycotted Vue altogether after that, and I'm still torn between getting Vue 7 and just getting TG2 and being done with it  But again, that's based entirely on my personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt.)

Well, that's my Vue-related life story - hopefully that gives you a little extra information to play with when you make your final decision. I apologise if it seems too slanted.
~Shashin

[moodflow]

I agree with what's already been said above.

I used to own Vue but sold it since I didn't use it much, due to the below points.

For terrains, TG2 wins by far.
For foliage populations, Vue wins, but not by much, since TG2 can still do populations as well.
For atmospheric lighting, and clouds, TG2 wins by far.
For surfacing, TG2 wins, but Vue has SSS implemented, which really helps on for certain techniques