Hmmm, it's tough to say that Vue is slower or faster than TG2. It's very possible to generate high quality renders with quite ambitious render settings that still render reasonably fast. The question is what features you use in your scene. For example, high quality render settings for the atmosphere drastically increase render times for clouds that are created with a fractal noise. However, if you replace the fractal node with a simple noise node the sky renders pretty fast even on high settings, and often you won't even notice much of a difference in the clouds.
Areas where Vue renders very fast with very good quality:
- Standard heightfields, even high-res ones like 4096x4096
- Ecosystems with SolidGrowth Vue Plants; of course a very dense grassy hill takes longer than a hill with trees, but in general Ecosystems are very fast
- Volumetric materials
- Cloud layers without too complicated node networks
Areas where Vue is practically unusable due to its render times:
-Displacement mapping, first and foremost. Although e-on claim to have improved displacement in Vue 8 a lot (which they did, in fact) Vue's displacement engine is a mess, both quality- and memorywise. Displace a 512x512 heightfield terrain with a semi-complex function and the rendertime just explodes. Displace a 1024x1204 terrain and your PC freezes because the application becomes insanely memory hungry. Displace a procedural terrain, and the rendertimes rocket into the sky, but the application won't crash somehow. Oh, and by the way: I have 8 GB of DDR3 Ram, and I can't get it to work without an OoM message appearing (if I'm lucky)
- Large Ecosystems with X-Frog plants or objects with a similar complexity. Vue doesn't crash, but rendering a forest made out of X-Frog plants takes forever. To be fair, though, Vue's plants work very, very well for covering a large amount of land, and using some X-Frog plants for close-ups is not a problem.
- Clouds with complex functions. Don't even think about animating them without a render farm.
Other things like water and procedural terrains take quite long to render, but again it's a matter of the functions that are used and I wouldn't necessarily say that TG2 or similar applications render those things faster or slower. Having played with TG2 for the last three months extensively (and I am still not confident enough to show any of my experiments
) I think Vue 8 and TG2 are quite on par with Vue having a slight advantage in vegetation rendering speed and TG2 obviously having a huge one regarding displacement.
As for the render engines I agree that you will never get the crispyness of TG2 renders with Vue's render engine, no matter what you do. Vue 8 has gotten better with that, but the overall look and feel is still different to TG. However, for my tastes I find TG2's engine a little too sharp to be a photo, and Vue's a little too soft to convey enough realism in some cases. A mixture between Vue's softness and Terragen's sharpness would be great.
