The idea of this thread is good, but the execution is ...less than ideal, and indeed a little biased. I don't want to offend anyone and this posting is not intended as a reply to any particular message in this thread because most of the answers here are quite objective, but there are enough other threads in this forum and in other places where people can't stick to facts as most of you do
. I am sick of reading rants over rants on Vue with no substantial criticism.
Let's get things straight:
I have been using Vue Infinite since version 5, and I've upgraded all the way to 8 now. I love this software package, although as of lately I've been more frustrated with its bugs and instability than ever. The price policy is a whole different story that doesn't fit in here. One of Vue's biggest strenghts is also one of its biggest weaknesses: The ability to include presets for virtually everything, ranging from atmospheres to materials and render settings. This is done because of e-on software's modular approach. You can start out with a free-of charge version for absolute beginners (Vue 8 Pioneer) and then buy modules to add several new functionalities to your software. This way you can upgrade all the way to Vue 8 Professional (some Infinite features are not obtainable through modules).
Believe it or not, I find this to be a good approach. An absolute novice that has no experience with 3D artwork whatsoever would be overstrained even with Pioneer without any presets and scenes to study and dissect. In fact, Pioneer is aimed especially at the "point-and-click to make art" group. And what's so bad about that? Everybody needs to start somewhere, and really serious artists will soon want to create their own atmospheres and materials in order to create something of their own from the ground up. Vue makes this approach very easy, because you have enough presets you can study to see how things are done and then you will realize that they are just a starting base and that you need to improve upon them. So the reason you see so many bad Vue images is the novice's approach of the software package, but that doesn't mean you can't do good things with Vue. Please show me one single 3D novice who's looking at his first render and who's thinking something along the lines of "Oh my god, the final render preset is bad, there isn't nearly enough antialiasing on my plants, TG2'S preset is better".
Those people do need render presets more than anything else, and for their first images the quality provided by the "Final" render preset is more than enough. In your opinion, what should e-on call those presets? Final = "Fast and lousy settings for beginners"? Ultra ="Good quality for advanced users that are too lazy to tweak the settings by themselves?" Come on, you can't judge a software renderer on its preset render settings. I don't believe that the best TG2 artists around here don't tweak TG2's render settings, but rather use the standard ones. You can tweak Vue the same, and the results can be amazing while keeping render times reasonably low if you know what you're doing. The most distracting things about Vue are those people who go like "I've fired up Vue once, loaded a preset terrain, a preset atmosphere and a preset render setting, and it looked like cr*p. Conclusion: Vue is bad, I'll never use it again." I wonder what a Terragen 2 image might look like with a standard heightfield without tweaking, a most simple surface and an untweaked atmosphere. Does it look ok? Maybe. Does it look like true art or even realistic? I don't think so. If you want to truely criticise a software package you should have some experience with it that goes beyond a five minute point-and-click adventure .
That said I do think Vue has a lot of issues that cause a lot of frustration in regular intervalls, but the render quality is not one of it. Vue 8 is the buggiest version for me so far, and I am really mad at e-on for still not fixing some of the most serious bugs since V6. It's a love-hate relationship: I love Vue for its possiblities and workflow (when it does work as advertised), I hate it for its shortcomings and instability. The difference between me and a lot of other people who criticise Vue is that I've used the software extensively and don't just repeat things other people said. My frustration is based on personal experience, but so are also my positive experiences and my judgement on render quality.
I've purchased Terragen 2 with Xfrog plants a month ago, and I've been reading Tutorials ever since. I find Terragen to be much more stable than Vue, but much less accessible. Slowly I am getting the hang of it now, and I do think I can create a lot of things with some experience that wouldn't be possible in Vue, and vice-versa. I bought TG2 because of my frustration over V8, for some of its features and for its excellent support that you get in this forum and from planetside. The pricing doesn't hurt either. For a lack of long-time experience I can't comment on the render quality of the Terragen 2 renders in this thread, but I'd never say TG2 has a bad render engine because I've seen renders with low AA settings circling around the internet. In fact, I am so looking forward to learning this package in detail and using it together with Vue to get the best out of both worlds.
To contribute something to the topic, I rendered a scene in Vue 8 with the XFrog California Red Fir, a custom atmosphere with standard (very flat) lighting, no quality boost, the same infinite procedural terrain that Marc used and the "Final" preset. Render time was 5'33'' on a Core i7 @ 2.6Ghz. If you use a Core 2 Quad you might have to double that render time.
To Marc:
I do think that this might become a very interesting comparison chart, and I appreciate the time and effort you're going to spend completing this. I suggest you use the tips from wetbanana, Walli and the Planetside staff to make the comparison more useful and fair
Oh, and by the way: The sample scene depicted at page two of this thread ("Cerro Verde") which has a "less-than-realistic" terrain is a sample scene that came with Vue 5, which was 5 years ago! Why e-on kept this scene on Vue 8's sample CD is beyond me as it is outdated by now. However, the scene itself is still great and in 2005 it blew everybody's mind. If you want to judge Vue 8 on its sample scenes then you should probably use a sample scene that wasn't created with an older version
Daniel
