Quote from: PG on March 30, 2009, 05:24:01 AM
Quote from: latego on March 29, 2009, 02:50:03 PM
You can easily get obscene render times in Vue is you crank uselessly up atmosphere/antialias quality settings (something a TG user is quite likely to do just out of despise for Vue "inferior" engine ).
Yeah...?.? Isn't that what I was just saying? Vue's default render settings are a lot less detailed than Terragens, so if you pump them they take about the same amount of time. If you leave them as default then Vue has less work to do (especially as it has no GI pre-pass) so it'll do it faster.
Actually I said exactly the opposite...
I really found 2 great differences between TG and Vue (though this is likely not to be an exhaustive list because I did not spend much time with TG2):
1) TG2 terrains are much more sharper/detailed. True, because TG adds by default tiny displacement (not only bump mapping) to terrains and therefore the comparison TG Terrains vs. Vue standard terrains is totally unfair. To make a fair comparison you have to put in one side of the ring TG terrains and on the other Vue procedural terrains with displacement materials: only in this case the comparison is fair.
2) Vue textures look fuzzy. True, because, for a reason I cannot fathom, textures are not only antialiased by rendering parameters, but also as texture property (in the Advanced Material Editor window, on the upper right, you will see a checkbox labeled Anti-aliased; uncheck it and rerender. You will be astonished by how much the corresponding material becomes sharper. If you have Infinite, in the Render Options windows, press the Anti-Aliasing button to open the corresponding Anti-Aliasing Options window and select Crisp as strategy, this will boost even more the sharpness of the render). Every default texture I have opened has this unwanted extra-antialising step selected... so roll up your sleeves.
E-On likes to torpedo its product... another demented setting is the new value of the quality of the ecosystem population engine: now it is just 43% and if you do not raise it, you have trees happily growing inside objects, even when told to stay away from them (raise this setting to 100%; ecosystem population is just slightly slowed ant the results are much better).
Bye!!!
P.S.: recently I bought Carrara 7 and I found that its engine gives easily very sharp renders and noticed that the terrain fedelity to externally generated terrain maps is just unbelievable; the down side is that things that are just a few clicks away in Vue require some actual work in Carrara. For example, you have not ecosystems as materials: you create Surface Replicators, add them the objects to replicate and then, if required, edit the shaders which control object placement. The end result is as powerful as Vue one, but much more work intensive.
P.P.S.: Vue looks intuitive but it is not. You have to learn a lot in order to be able to make it do exactly what you want. The largest Vue tutorial site (
http://www.geekatplay.com/) has 107 different tutorials in just the generic area; then you have specialized interests! The reality is that if you want to attain a certain effect, you have to put into action the required machinery; it will be presented to you in different ways in different applications, but at the end, there are no free lunches...