Quote from: moodflow on March 18, 2009, 06:20:21 PM
Quote from: calico on March 18, 2009, 01:25:18 PM
latego, you are aware that Vue has been used for a few movies already, correct?
Calico, it was used, but as a more of a base for matte paintings, rather than directly.
Exactly. BASIS for MATTE PAINTINGS. In other words, not able to perform completely by itself a "simple" task (or at least, simple by Pixar/Dreamworks/ILM standards...).
Nowadays, GC movies have reached such levels of sofistication and complexity that Hollywood needs are to architectural rendering needs as these are to some "chrome spheres on a checkerboard" (which shows how many years I have spent dabbling with CG, starting in 1997 with POV-Ray 3.5).
There is a great publication here in Italy, called "Computer Grafica" (www.imagonet.it). They also include content from CineFEX (
http://www.cinefex.com/) so I can get some information about movie making challenges, tools and workflow.
E.g., I read that in some scenes of "Happy Feet" there were 700,000 (not a typo) individually animated penguins, controlled by a software called Massive, which has been used also for Lord of the Rings mass combat scenes and 300 and many other titles. Just think about having not 700,000 replicated trees (using proxies) but 700,000 complex, animated meshes with bones, EACH acting indipendently and interacting with the surrounding meshes... this is an example of what they can do in Hollywood (and an example of what they need).
Another problem with movies is that in that field people use Renderman engines, which follow quite a different philosophy from programs like Vue (or TG). You create, rig and animate meshes with apps like Maya/XSI/Lightwave etc, then export the results to a format which can be digested by these engines and render. Shaders are not a graph of nodes... they are actual programs, written in Renderman Shading Language (now you know what that .rsl file extension means) which describe how to compute the resulting image. Just an example: in Vue or TG, antialiasing is nothing more than selecting some rendering options. In Renderman shaders, you have to code by hand the band limited approximations of your shaders in order to prevent moire patterns! There are whole books (and whole careers) about Renderman technology. All these techniques do not mesh at all with the rendering process of the programs we are talking about. Even doing matte paint is not a simple "well will add this scene as a background in post production" because foreground objects rendering interacts with the background (and vice versa).
Vue is a good landscaping application. You can get quite easily decent results with it (and if you master it, even more than just decent) but, obviously, it has its limit. Terragen 2, if provided with some more capabilities (and complemented with xFrog vegetation), can be a real competitor to Vue. As I alredy wrote in other posts, a sensible Vue user is the best fan of TG2!
Bye!!!
P.S.: better imported mesh handling (the horse bones keep being hitten) and a way to manage the whole rendering network in a more localized way (e.g. in Vue, when editing the graph which computes the procedural terrain you do not even see the graph which creates the density of the clouds, which is in its turn completely ignorable when editing the graph which control ecosystem density).
