Hey guys, thanks for the props for the image at the top of this thread. I'd like to make a couple of points about it and Vue in general.
First off, until recently, TG has had much better fractal diffuse maps than Vue ever had. But with Vue 7.0, Vue is starting to catch up. The image you referenced was a single and basic terrain fractal, with a bunch of distortion added.
Someone noted TG seems to do better large scenes (vistas) with depth in them than does Vue. There are of course some vista type scenes created by Vue, but one sees many more in TG galleries. You can check out
this page for some vistas-- be sure to click on the icons to see them in full size. I'm not sure, but I believe the vista issue has something to do with workflow as opposed to capabilities of each program. For instance, this recent render (orig 1600 wide, 2.2 hrs rendertime on 2.50 GHz Intel Core2 Quad CPU | scene creation time ~3 hrs):
Uses a single procedural terrain for the canyons and a HyperTerrain for the center rock formation. Granted, a single TG's Xfrog tree is still better than Vue's HD trees. The point is, IIRC, one 'searches around' for a view in TG, whereas typically one creates the view with multiple terrains in Vue. In the view above, I used the TG way of 'searching around' to find the scene for the hero tree. Still, I'm not sure Vue's fractals are quite as good for these type of scenes as TG's fractals are.
Regarding Vue's fractals, all of my terrain work, and most of Dax's terrain work (not all, but most of the recent work), I've been told is done directly in Vue's terrain editor. He's got a pretty nice tutorial out on it as well. And most all of his HyperTerrain work is done with procedural displacement, bump and diffuse maps. Vue doesn't do normal maps at this time. In particular, the distortion capability is nice for creating mud slides like in this image (~3 hrs rendertime | scene creation time ~3 hrs--already had model):
Clouds seem to be pretty much the same for both apps these days. Vue now has spectral2 clouds which are really quite impressive. Dax has some major cloud test renders
here.
So, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask a few questions about TG2:
How long do you all typically take to setup a scene? How long to render? Can you get radiosity bounce from surrounding surfaces? This last question is particularly interesting, because IMO Vue's 7.0 lighting model really enhances landscape renders using radiosity-- just check out the top image in my post.
Lastly, I really do think it's more about the artist than about the software. It all comes down to what one is comfortable with.
best regards,
Chipp
