Erste Eindrücke von Version 7

Gefunden im CGtalk-Forum; die ersten Eindrücke eines Siggraph-Besuchers. Wollte es euch nicht vorenthalten:

Zitat

Several notes/observations:

Definitely still beta - crashed not only during presentation, but other oddities on various workstations that it was being shown. But not egregiously so.

Infinite plane & ecosystem looks way cool - so instead of placing a bunch of planes and eco systems, you put one plane and one ecosystem. In practice, it seemed to work quite well. Impressed! Presumably it would not only save on construction, assembling, but produce a better, more seamless result. It's camera dependent - not sure how *Renderman* like (Renderman has distance based properties) - this should reduce overall polys required, memory, etc - not sure if its adjusting resolution of meshes at certain distance or not.

It was interesting, the preview renders did seem to be faster than what I've experienced (same machine at show and what I use).

Bucket based rendering. Wasn't implement throughout every build - but many had bucket based rendering which seemed to result in faster renders.

Function editor in clouds, terrain. The function editor that can be accessed in matierals is now available in others areas - in spectral 2 clouds, and terrain meshes. A few more features added too - for instance a fractal noise that is for tweaked for landscapes - worked well in practice.

New parameters for clouds - such as feathering - also a property where clouds can dissipate as camera distance decreases. Clouds in general are rendered better than 6 (which was already pretty darn good).

HD Trees - call them high density, or High Definition - but as camera gets close, they continue to look quite spectacular. In particular, bark, trunk textures look quite good.

Leaves now can have displacement - thus you can curve leaves for more realism.

New water plane allows for waves and foam - displacement mapping technique - foam is also height and object controlled. Looked quite good in practice - though at high displacement (think stormy) there seemed to be issues with resolution on the mesh. But coast lines, boat wakes, etc all looked quite good.

Xstream. Incorporates fully into host app - menus, dialog boxes, and importantly - objects are now the same in viewport of host app as they are in vue - for instance painting eco systems works! I saw this in Cinema at the show - the app I use, and was pretty pleased.

There are other little bits, but these were the main ones I saw and the ones I remembered!

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LG
Yoro

Und hier ist nochwas:

Zitat

I had the chance to attend Siggraph 08 yesterday. E-on software showed Vue 7, and will be released late this year.

One of the mayor improvements is the direct control over oceans without using the function editor. When you create an ocean and a terrain is also created, the program will notice the interaction between land and water, creating foamy shore lines and white caps. A new dialog window will allow you to control the amount of withe caps, shore line foam and water turbulence among other things.

Spectral atmospheres is another improvement. Clouds look more real than ever due to better use of transparency and textures.
Also, render speed was improved. According to e-on software developers, it will render scenes up to 4 times faster than Vue 6.
Vue 6 Xtreme was another mayor improvement. Vue 7 menus will be part of Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, C4D and Lightwave; this will eliminate the need to switch between applications and will allow the artist to access all of Vue's tools from the host application.

Klingt ja alles schonmal nicht schlecht :))!

LG
Yoro

250 - 300 € ... *seufz* wenns so teuer wird, werd ich mir das sehr genau überlegen.
Der Wassergenerator hätte schon was für sich, Ecos auf unendlichen Flächen brauche ich dafür nicht sooo dringend. 4 x schnellere Renderzeit wäre allerdings der Wahnsinn!

Ich werde auf jeden Fall erstmal abwarten, bis die gröbsten Bugs gefixt sind - und hören was die anderen, die es direkt zum Release kaufen, dann so alles berichten.

LG
Yoro

Achtung, Mammutbeitrag!

Hier ein langer und ausführlicher Bericht (zumindest die wesentlichen Teile) von 'Forrester' aus dem CC-Forum:

Zitat

What we saw at SIGGraph is a very early beta, just as Peggy said. This means that the "direction" Vue 7 will take is on display (and appears to be firmly established), but much of the foundation is still in the process of being laid. So, it is impossible to answer questions about "improved performance" and "improved stability" at this point in time. And, of course, since this is just a demo/preview, there were problems with a few crashes (I think about 6 of them during some 40 total hours of live demo time. Actually, not too bad, considering that three I saw came about as the demonstrators took questions and tried to illustrate some feature in response to those stray questions.)

As to "direction", the new Vue is taking a development path that further pioneers the unique features of Vue, vis-a-vis other established modelling programs such as Maya, Max, Mudbox and things like Realflow. So, there will not be modelling capabilities added to this version of Vue, nor will there be particles.
Makes sense. The Next Limit people took years to develop the most advanced particle software suite on the planet - and it is a large and extensive software program in its own right. It doesn't make any sense, at least to me, to try to compete with that. Same thought with respect to modelling capabilities. In fact, if these are put into Vue, won't we all just bitch about them? Compare them to the products by Next Limit and Autodesk? Say that they are not good enough?

There does seem to be an exception to this principle, though, with regard to the rendering engine. What I saw, even in very early beta, appears to be a much faster rendering engine. Not by a magnitude (that is, not faster by an order of magnitude), but still much faster. So, I concluded privately, that the rendering engine probably has been re-written, with some serious coding efficiencies introduced this time around. Whether or not it has been re-written to provide a platform for continued enhancements in the future, I cannot say. Nor did I ask. But, it is faster and will some of us will not be waiting up all night in the future.

Along these lines, the radiosity lighting is also significantly improved. I did not get a chance to play around with this, nor to ask questions as to the exact changes that have been made, but we all are going to like making interior scenes. I did look at two sample interior renders whose quality is easily equivalent to mental ray (on my Maya, and on MAX), and equivalent to that produced by the VRay series of plug-ins. Totally noise-free. I would say that is is not yet the quality produced by the Maxwell Renderer program, but then what is? But, please note that
I did not try it out (there is no time available at SIGGraph to take a machine out of commission long enough to try a high quality render), nor look at the radiosity light and the atmosphere controls. So, I don't know how these two samples were made. But, the samples are pretty impressive for a program whose forte is outdoor scenery.

The strengths and unique features of Vue lie in its ability to create a convincing physical (outdoor) world, and to do so relatively easily. In this regard, Vue 7 presents another serious leap forward in the base technology.

There is now an infinite procedural terrain, in addition to the individual terrain meshes Vue creates. It is hard to describe in lay terms what a significant technical achievement this is, or for me to explain clearly all the new abilities this will introduce. It's one of those things I have to think about, for awhile. Basically, using the Function Editor, you will be able to create things such as an infinite terrain, with lush jungle in the deeps, snow-capped mountains at the crest, dry foothils just below the crest of the rocky mountains, and all manner of real terrains and ecosystems (in the scientific sense of the term). You can do this because you should be able to write features into the "terrain" file according to elevation.

The other advanced terrain editors that we like, GoeControl 2 and the like, are all procedural, and now Vue is as well. You still have the existing Terrain Editor capable of creating a single terrain mesh, but now you have the procedural terrain maker capable of creating a finely detailed alluvial plain as well. Very nice! I predict that this will be both the strongest and the most under-rated advance in the whole package.

And, along these lines, the Vue ecosystem capability was always procedural. Try contemplating what a strong capability you are going to have with the infinite terrain and the ecosystem capability workiing in tandem.

Incidently, one of the ways the Vue development team has been able to create all this and make it "work" is because they traded off the requirement to populate an entire terrain with plants or other objects when ecossytems are being used. Now, the infinite terrain, at least will be populated only in the area the camera "sees." Conserves memory and cpu cycles for the things YOU want to place into your scene! Very cool!

The Water Editor. You always could control foam against the shoreline and wave height and wave wind direction in the Function Editor. Now, you have a little control panel just for these kinds of functions for large waterbodies (lakes, oceans, etc.). An idiot can use it

The kind-of-new thing is that you also have displacement controls in this Water Editor. Nicholas was kind enough to give me a quick tour of it, in person. (I'm a water person - I couldn't help asking. Bad Pam!) Within a minute and half, I had deep waves with slender whitecaps on top. Everybody is going to love this.

The most robust new feature demo'd is the "Spectral 2 Clouds." Hang onto your seats, folks! You have never, ever seen CG clouds like these! Feathering controls, sharpness controls. They are actual "objects" - they interact with the sunlight or other lights,. They have visible mass. They can be layered. You can hang those meta clouds in among them if you need just the right last little tweak. They can be are shaped by the Function Editor, so that you have almost precision control over their pattern/shape/layout. Absolutely amazing. And this set of functions appears to be fully developed - very stable and robust, as I said.
Finally, for those who use XStream, as I do. The next version of XStream is a plug-in to MAX, Maya, Cinema4d, XSI and such. No complex bridgework this time. Much smoother. I did not get to see what's under the hood, so I can't comment further than this, but the plug-in approach should make it simpler and less buggy.

OK - now as to what I didn't see. I'm not a Poser person. I didn't ask questions about it - sorry and my apologies. But, not being a Poser person, I wouldn't have know what to ask anyhow. I don't even recal anyone in the demo area asking questions about Poser. It seems to me that the majority of the folks attending Siggraph are kind of like myself - straight up modelers, animaters, riggers, texture painters, and such - not so many Poser people in this particular crowd.

One of our good collegues here put on a demo on "architectural rendering." I had been looking forward to that, but it didn't turn out to be what an architect would have expected or needed. It was a very excellent demo of Vue 7 working as a plug-in within Cinema4d, using a building and putting plants into planters via ecosytems, but not a lot on lighting, materials and displaying a building to advantage, setting it in an urban or landscape context and the like. So, we don't know how Vue 7 really will perform in the requirements set typical or architectural work.

In sum, as a long-time professional forester and hydrologist, I can swear to you that Vue 7 is going to push the ability to create a realistic natural environment to unbelievable levels. If you are not yet tired of sunsets, mountains, forests, oceans, beaches, this is for you! The Terragen folk will not be liking this next Vue release.

As a postscript note, for those of you who have been reluctant to learn something about the Vue Function Editor - now is the time to start. It is going to be your main avenue to all the new and advanced features of Vue 7.

It is not that hard to learn - and lay off the nasty comments to Peggy, already. [ Nobody here on C3D does this, but the commentors on Rendo are not always civil.] You need her, and her ability to explain the Function Editor to you in her LVS Online Course. She makes it easy to understand and fun to play with. So, if you have not taken her online course, you should consider doing so now, and soon. And if you can't take her course, send her $25 USD and ask her nicely for a copy of her course materials that focus on the Function Editor.

For those of you who are trained in the Fine Arts and find the Function Editor a totally incomprehsible thing, it's time to get started. At SIGGraph, I saw software to make procedural objects, procedureal textures, procedural everything, including a $7,000.00 program to make procedural cities. All of this stuff is accomplished via an interface like the Vue Function Editor. In fact, the Vue Function Editor is one of the simpler and more easy-to-understand interfaces that I saw.

The message for professional artists is that if you are going to have any kind of future in computer or digital graphics, you have got to learn this stuff!

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Je mehr Infos eintröpfeln, desto interessanter und besser klingt die Sache (auch wenn ich kein besonderer Fan des Function Editors bin *g*). Wenn (bzw. sobald) EOn all diese Features bugfrei in den Griff kriegt, kaufe ichs mir auch!

LG
Yoro

Naoo, ich glaube, es spielt da eine große Rolle, in wie weit man selbst betroffen ist. Bei mir z.B. läuft Vue stabiler als Bryce es je getan hat und bis jetzt ist mir nur ein einziger Bug begegnet, der gestern zum dritten mal überhaupt bei mir aufgetreten ist (Ecos lassen sich nicht löschen).
Damit läßt es sich gut leben und ich persönlich bin sehr zufrieden.

Ein anderer Punkt ist, daß es zu Vue, insbesondere den Ecos, keine Alternative gibt, außer Vue kann das kein Prog.
Demzufolge kann sich Eon einiges erlauben, das Produkt wird trotzdem gekauft *g*.

LG
Yoro