Wow they certainly don't waste any time between releases. It only seems like the other day when vue 7 was released.
Vue 8
3D Terrain sculpting
Directional displacement
Spectral atmosphere 3
I wonder if their 3rd atmosphere engine will finally catch up with Terragens atmosphere.
Quote from: reck on July 25, 2009, 06:20:03 AM
Wow they certainly don't waste any time between releases to squeeze every penny from their customers ;D
...
Anyhow, I'm curious as well :)
Matt and Jo should learn from E-On.
Quickly pile bugs upon bugs (aka new features), never waste time fixing old ones (they are random features, as states the signature of one of the Cornucopia3D moderators), increment yearly the release number and feast upon users credit cards.
Bye ;D ;D ;D
It really is a joke isn't it. The amount of greif a guy at work gets when setting stuff off to render after installing the latest patch, which has f'd up something else. When did 7.5 come out? About 6 months ago? I bet the people who shelled out for that are happy!
yeah i received the email too...
what a strange way to do business... but errr... people seem to like this... i really don't understand !
I have only seen a couple of Vue renders which impress me. World Construction Set was making better renders back in the 90's.
Yes it really is a joke. Why don't they take some time and stabilise their current engine and fix the bugs rather than steaming on with a full new version.
As i'm sure most people can see it's simply about ripping more money out of their customers. I'm sure the people that purchased 7 would have been hoping for some more free point upgrades rather then e-on jumping straight to number 8 and doubt going to charge a lot of money for their existing customers to upgrade.
Hi,
I still work with Vue 6 which is good enough for me, because I am not a professional. I have spent a lot of money for this programme and I can't afford to spend more and more every few months.
Quote from: Lupina on July 25, 2009, 01:36:01 PM
Hi,
I still work with Vue 6 which is good enough for me, because I am not a professional. I have spent a lot of money for this programme and I can't afford to spend more and more every few months.
I've never upgraded from V6, either. I'm sure by Christmas, E-on will probably have Vue 10 ready, they aren't getting any money from me for it.
PS has two versions of their software, and one didn't even reach v.1.0. Seems to me that they have the right idea. If something is worth creating, try to make THAT version the best it possibly can be. A complete new version every six months is ridiculous, especially when these aren't free updates to fix previous bugs/glitches that their users have bought into.
I thought this was a joke (http://www.e-onsoftware.com/about/press_materials/?page=..%2FPRIndex&date=July%2024,%202009)
It is!
LOL ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
naaaaah !!!
the joke will be the price ;)
I heard there are 3 bands. The lite pack for £40,000, the standard pack that includes a free installer for £70,000, and the ultimate pack which you get randomly generated fixes for 12% of the bugs that are included in all the packs. That'll be £1.405e+012
Now come on PG, you're just being silly now! You know very well there is NO free installer, that will cost you another £36000. It doesn't work of course, but you can pay the extra £12000 for the patch that fixes it (and breaks everything else) A Bargain I call it! ;D
Hey, don't kill the messenger. Steve Jobs told me :D
Lol! :D
hehe E-on have really built a bad reputation for ripping people off, even their loyal existing customers are getting kicked in the teeth when it comes to the constant non-free updates that are offered every few months.
They want their customers to upgrade to the latest release each time and offer the "special" upgrade price or don't upgrade this round and then pay the "unspecial" price when it comes to the next release.
At least Vue does not splatter animations with black triangles. I might give it another go as although TG2 renders look much better I have been unable to get rid to the black triangles and I have tried everything.
We should remember its easy to rubbish other software but they can all do the same. No progremme is perfect not even TG2.
I have had these black triangles. They seem to come from displacements which fold into themselves. Check the amount of noise used in the displacements; try reducing it when these occur.
I decided to download a free trial of Vue (7?) but forgot to install it, and now I don't know where the #^@! it is! Anyway, as soon as I downloaded it, they signed me up for some E-on newsletter! >:( So every so often, I got an annoying, almost spam-type notification about every little thing they did! >:( And Gmail didn't mark it as spam! So I decided to simply archive every installment of that spamletter and I haven't had that problem since. I probably have a million of those in my Archive now....
Anyway there's my complaint about E-on's spam "newsletter". I hope you enjoyed this.
Some of my Flickr contacts use Vue. I hate to admit it but there is some potential there. It's just way too expensive, and I have read many bad blogs about the support.
Quote from: njeneb on November 06, 2009, 10:19:56 PM
Some of my Flickr contacts use Vue. I hate to admit it but there is some potential there. It's just way too expensive, and I have read many bad blogs about the support.
Unfortunately, Vue clouds are improving: see this thread http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2786381 (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2786381) about a clouds package being developed for Vue 8 (Spectral Atmospheres 3) :(
Bye...
I'd buy Vue 8 if it was rendering at light-speed. It seems pretty acceptable for animations (and it's also really easy), but only if it would be doing at last 0.5 FPS.
I don't want to wait a couple of minutes just to have a not-so-photorealistic frame for an animation. And doing animations with all the neat stuff (or should I say "standard" stuff for TG users) - GR + procedurals + lots of vegetation + spectral clouds, etc., would make my electricity bill cry out loud.
Hmmm, those are getting better although terragen is still superior in the right hands. I particularly like the fifth picture in the thread, I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to create that in tg2 for awhile.
Quote from: PorcupineFloyd on November 07, 2009, 05:20:20 AM
I don't want to wait a couple of minutes just to have a not-so-photorealistic frame for an animation.
Wait a couple of minutes? Not even on preview if you have a more than trivial scene rendered with a DVD-compatible resolution (and not even mention HDTV requirements).
As far as I have read in various forums, creating animation in Vue appears to be a not-trivial task as there is the problems of removing flickering noise; in addition, if you have dynamical components like dinamically populated scenes, you have trees popping abruptly in when you move your camera ;D
No, the problem is that Vue atmospheres appear to be catching up with TG2 ones.
Needless to say, the price tag is, as usual for E-On software, ghastly: for the sum you need to buy 8 Complete from scratch, you can get TG2 + Xfrog plants. A last consideration: I was toying with the idea to "upgrade" from 7 Infinite to 8 Complete to get read of the buggy copy protection scheme, but, apparently, it is not even considered in the offers so... I am... royally... screwed UP!
Bye >:(
vue 8 clouds are catching up but they haven't caught up and i don't think they ever will.
plus terragen is damn stable unlike vue which is basically useless because of unfixed bugs from as far back as vue 5 infinite plus all the new junk they have added in
This may be great to hear for some of you, but I am really sad right now.
I received my upgrade to Vue 8 Infinite yesterday and so far I am not very impressed. Displacement on terrains that are bigger than 512x512 are once again NOT possible without making Vue crash >:(, and I have 12 GB of DDR3 Ram and a Core i7 920 overclocked @ 3.6 Ghz, so it's not my system's fault. Their whole promises about displacement improvements are useless if it doesn't work for high resolution standard terrains. I am not interested in displacing solely metablobs (=vue primitives with a nurbs-like surface). Vue is a landscape generator and thus it's focus should be on features that are compatible with terrains. Some custom atmospheres from Vue 7 Infinite look completely different when rendered (after hours of tweaking the atmosphere in V7 and aborting it's render in V7 because of the noise that's not a very funny thing for me) and dynamic populations from a Vue 7 scene are completely out-of-scale and appear at different places.
The terrain editor might convince me that upgrading was not such a huge mistake after all, but after playing with Vue 8 for one evening I consider this to be the worst upgrade ever. Never thought I'd be that disappointed...
Quote from: Bluestorm on November 11, 2009, 08:55:57 AM
This may be great to hear for some of you, but I am really sad right now.
I am not happy to hear about other people troubles.
I read some comments on Renderosity which hinted at many differences in atmosphere behaviour so I think that you'd be better off rebuilding your .atm-s :(. The terrain and dynamic population bugs do really suck (a hint: do not only provide a bug report, expose the bug with renders, otherwise your information will be put aside by "tech support" (sick joke) and fanboys).
The problem with that software house is that they keep adding features on features (to "justify" the dreadfull upgrde rat race) while not fixing old bugs and intrucing new ones. I like Carrara (b.t.w. DAZ just announced C8 beta before the end of the year), am going to try Blender 2.5 and am still thinking about how add TG2 to my pipeline.
Bye... again, really sorry for the bugs.
Quote from: latego on November 07, 2009, 04:55:43 AM
Unfortunately, Vue clouds are improving: see this thread http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2786381 (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2786381) about a clouds package being developed for Vue 8 (Spectral Atmospheres 3) :(
Bye...
This was a very interesting link, thank you Latego.
I think some of these clouds are pretty realistic. I do have a lot of experience with clouds in TG2, so I take the freedom to judge that not only the cloud shapes from these Vue images are good, but moreso the internal light scattering is a big step more realistic than TG2's (sorry planetside ;) ).
Given the right controls and the right fracals, both renderers seem to be able to produce nice clouds, however it's always and again the internal light scattering that I'm missing with TG2, especially since the fake internal scattering (which wasn't ideal, but at least something) has been changed.
My hopes are that this area will be looked after, as soon as this 64bit project has been completed.
Cheers,
Frank
Thanks, latego. This wasn't meant to be sarcastic, I simply wouldn't have been surprised if there came a "I-could-have-told-you-so" answer and probably I even wouldn't have become angry at that statement. The thing is that all in all I was very content with Vue 7 which proved to be much more stable for me than any other version before (I started with Vue 5 Infinite). Sure, Vue 7 also crashed on me sometimes randomly which could make me furious as hell, but in the end the crashes were few, in most cases avoidable and related to very complex scenes or operations. I was hesitating whether I should upgrade to Vue 8 or not, because the features that were added didn't justify the upgrade price for me (I also posted this in the Renderosity cloud thread that you mentioned above), but ultimately I compared the prices of previous upgrades if you had skipped one version and if e-on continue their price policy I am sure I would have payed more next year for upgrading from Vue 7 Infinite to Vue 9 Infinite compared to what I have to pay for upgrading from Vue 7 to 8 and from 8 to 9. Having admired Terragen 2's displacement and overhangs for several years now I was sold with e-on's new and improved displacement engine. I think it's understandable that I am disappointed that particularly this feature doesn't work as promised. The sad thing is that it's not even a bug, because I have to admit that there are some neat new displacement options and that it works a lot faster and more precisely on lower resolution terrains and primitives. But with high resolution terrains the software is just so damn hungry for memory that it crashes my entire PC. That's not a bug, that's simply bad management of resources for heavily detailed terrains. And that's also what makes it useless for me, unless I find a workaround or can live with lower displacement quality. I mean, 12 GB of 1600 Mhz DDR3-RAM - how much more do I need to use this feature if that's still not enough?
The changes in the atmosphere editor lie in the render engine, so previous atmospheres should work without problems and -most importantly- roughly look the same. And they do, except for the clouds - they look a lot better now, the new lighting in Spectral Atmospheres 3 is incredible. I have to agree with Frank that the cloud lighting is far superior to TG2 now. If e-on finally allows us to change the noise that is used to produce the cloud details then also the clouds will be finaly on par with TG2, if not even better because Vue's function editor offers more nodes to use in this area. Either way Spectral 3 is a big step into the right direction.
My Vue 7 atmosphere was designed to expose a big, dramatic hole in the sky with extremely bright godrays peeking through, and in Vue 8 the godrays are completely gone, so now I can start from scratch. That's what made me angry, but I guess this happened indeed due to the new render engine. Ah well, I can't really blame e-on for this.
The population bug is very annoying, though. Maybe it's a scene dependent thing, I will have to check that.
So at the moment there is only one "real" bug - the dynamic population scale. The new terrain editor is beyond awesome I must admit, and apart from the displacement issue Vue 8 is running rock stable so far. My first post included a lot of frustration, but now after calming down I don't think anymore that this upgrade was really a mistake. E-on, fix the displacement and I am a happy customer, because everything else works as advertised.
Quote from: Bluestorm on November 11, 2009, 08:55:57 AM
...I received my upgrade to Vue 8 Infinite yesterday and so far I am not very impressed. Displacement on terrains that are bigger than 512x512 are once again NOT possible without making Vue crash >:(, and I have 12 GB of DDR3 Ram and a Core i7 920 overclocked @ 3.6 Ghz, so it's not my system's fault...
Bluestorm , just a thought but i have heard really strange things going on with overclocked pc's .
Have you tried without overclocking?.You know especially 3d software are very demanding on cpu's and overclocked ram and such.
Kadri.
Thanks Kadri, but I know now that there's a memory leak in the current V8 build which leads to extremely long rendertimes :(. There's talk about that in the official Vue 8 forum at e-on.
So that might be a reason for the bad memory management. Interestingly enough I can displace procedural (!) terrains without any problem. Strange, because they're a lot more hungry for memory than standard ones. But oh well, I am glad it works now.
I submitted a render of Vue's Spectral 3 atmospheres to my deviantart:
http://moviematters.deviantart.com/art/Cloud-Concert-143547113
Nice render Bluestorm.
Is the DOF in V8 or post ?
Kadri.
Thanks :)
The DoF is postwork with the DoF Pro plugin from www.dofpro.com . I can recommend this plugin to anyone who wants to add DoF to their renders. I don't know if Terragen can also produce Z-Depth images, but even if it didn't you can still add nice subtle effects without a proper depthmap.
I am still using V3, but I will upgrade to V4 sooner or later.
Thanks :)
Ok, I did it. I just bought the Terragen 2 Mega Bundle for 799 $. The price is unbeatable (although I fell of my chair when I recognized that the 799 $ didn't include the VAT, but oh well ;D), considering the price for the Standalone Xfrog Libraries and Xfrog 3.5. To be honest I bought it because of the plants, since Vue plants are definitely not suited for closeups, and I have long wanted to model my own plants. But since I get Terragen 2 "on top of that" ;) I guess e-on won't see my money for quite a while. I've been so pi**ed of by the latest Vue 8 update that I am longing for a stable software now.
So, after all I hope to get the best out of both worlds, since I can use Xfrog plants both with Vue and Terragen 2 :)
Terragen 2 + Xfrog + Vue 8 Infinite = probably a very powerful package.
Terragen 2 + computer = powerful enough for me! :D