Carrara vs. Vue - Polyloop

daring · 30th December 2006, 15:18

Does anyone have knowledge of Vue that the might be able to tell me the advantages vs. Carrara which I think is awesome, but doesn't seem to load and use large detailed textures into the Terrain editor well, over displacement maps. Don't get me wrong I love Carrara. I think it rocks to know end. I don't even have the pro version and utilize Hex with my lack of pro tools. Integrates well importing and exporting.

But Vue sure looks impressive. Is it much higher end for a pro and can do much greater things than Carrara? Sure looks cool on their web site.

daring · 30th December 2006, 16:17

Maybe I'm writing to the wrong forum? Clue me in. Call me a noob, just don't call me a knob!

Thomas · 30th December 2006, 17:16

Yes, it was in the wrong section, I moved it.
But to answer you, let the others do it, I'm not the specialist of Vue!

daring · 30th December 2006, 17:29

Thanks Thomas - you are a great moderator

daring · 30th December 2006, 17:31

administrator - sorry, maybe I am a knob.

lafnjack · 30th December 2006, 18:35

I would think its more people having NOT worked with Vue, than anything else. I haven't worked with Vue at all. Out of curiosity, any reason you chose Vue over Bryce?

I know a couple people here have mentioned Bryce. I started with Bryce myself. What are you looking for? Expansive terrain as something to animate or as a standalone picture? Character animation in a detailed terrain?

John

PS: Also, it is the holidays. People may be occupied. Give it a day or two. I could be wrong, and there could be a ton of Vue experts out there.

medeamajic · 30th December 2006, 18:37

Carrara can offer very good renders and unlike Vue it can also do figure animation. There was an article about Carrara 5 that stated the surface replicator of Carrara was better than Vue's. Vue is OK but you can only do landscapes unless you also have Poser.

I don't think Vue has a modeler.

daring · 31st December 2006, 04:31

I need a good landscape and tree program that animates well. Vue states they except billions of polys without a problem. Easily said. It's not until you buy it you find out that it doesn't work the way you had hoped. That's what I want to avoid, y'know? Carrara has got all the tools, but it seems to get slower and clumsier with every new element.

I'm trying to do flyovers for golf holes and I have made it work to some success with Carrara. But when you design a golf hole specific to a Golf Course that exists then you can't just plop in a lot of trees. They have to represent what actually exists on the real live golf course. So I have acheived, like I said some success even though its a fictitious hole I'm creating for a sample. Now that I've got a great looking hole with a detailed grass pattern, I've dropped in trees where they may be located. NOW things are startin' to bug out on me. Now that I've got the camera going the way I look I try adding more trees or plants and weird things like: it shows there is a tree there but I can't see the tree only the manipulator handles. Too many polys? Now Carrara is bugging out? Maybe my texture is too complex? Is this possible? Also my preview of motion has slowed way down and I'm not nearly detailed as I want to be with 3d features (more Trees of varying types.)

Now I did use duplicate which I believe does not add extra polys. Am I correct on that?

Ya pretty complex. But I need a program that's gonna do the job, and able to keep from pulling out my hair in the process.

daring · 31st December 2006, 04:51

To answer your question lafnjack I have used Bryce in the past. I have it on my "Mac", which is the only thing I use (not that Mac is better is just all I've used, never been an other than Mac User). I have Bryce 5.0 and can't get it to work at all with OSX. Why should I use Bryce? Because it's cheap? with little or no support. Maybe it would work better, guess I really don't know.

medeamajic · 31st December 2006, 05:19

The Open GL preview of Carrara works great if only one view is displayed. The size of the animation preview does not matter for Open GL. It can be a 640 X 480 preview or a 800 X 600 and the speed will be the same. With the Eovia software I can shrink my preview to 300 X 400 and it plays much faster. Perhaps you could try this for fly throughs to get the timing right. A Dual Core Pentium 4 at 3.4 GHZ or a Core 2 Dual at 2.130 GHZ should out perform an Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS with 512 MB of RAM if the preview is only 400 X 300. If the animation preview window is 1024 X 768 then Open GL will work better. If you have a fast system try the Eovia software at about 400 X 300 for animation previews and the playback speed should increase over open GL.

daring · 31st December 2006, 22:06

GeForce FX 5200 on a G5 single processor 1.6Ghz. 3 gigs DDR sdram.
I take it this would not be the ideal machine at this time. Well hopefully this year will bring a cool new one that'll indulge me in faster renders. That would help. I don't know if it'll remedy any of my Carrara bugs though. But thanks for the advice.

daring · 31st December 2006, 22:14

Here is what I have so far - for curiosity's sake. Feel free to offer suggestions. Thanks!

http://drdesigncreates.com/testflite/testflite-4.html

medeamajic · 1st January 2007, 02:01

I used to have a P4 at 3.2 GHZ with a Geforce FX 5200 and 64 MB of RAM. I know your scene would bog down my old P4 system. You can get a custom built PC with a Geforce 7600 and a P4D at 3.4 GHZ for $800.00 or less.

I now have a P4D (dual Core) at 3.4 GHZ and a Core 2 Dual (C2D) at 2.13. Both are light years a head of my old system. It is night and day. Your fly thoughs should not be slugish and play at 30 FPS in software mode (400 X 300) on either machine. When I use surface replicator on my new system I can have it duplicate an actual tree instead of only placing bounding boxes. A new system should help out but there will be a limit to how much a P4D or C2D can handle. I think both systems should handle your scene for animation previews at 30 FPS. You could post the Carrara file so I could test out the animation previews on my system at 400 X 200.

daring · 3rd January 2007, 19:22

OK thanks for the advice - so does anyone out there know anything about VUE ?

LoneGunman · 4th January 2007, 02:21

Currently using Vue6Infinite/Beta for almost all of my renders...

What would you like to know ?

daring · 4th January 2007, 04:01

How does it rate up against Carrara in the terrain and tree areas. Usability?Does it handle hi poly counts well? Would you say it is more Pro? I kind of feel like Carrara could do better handling its trees on terrains.

LoneGunman · 4th January 2007, 08:03

In general, Vue renders bit slower then Carrara, but, output has more depth to it. Antialiasing, however, is more complicated than it should be, and sometimes it fails on lower settings.

Rendering has a different approach then Carrara, it is a farely advanced version of distributed ray tracing, first time seen in Bryce5, I believe. This tehnique produces far better soft shadows then one in Carrara, but it is time consuming (for those less patient, shadow maps are there).

In my opinion Vue handles high poly counts very well, it has nice LOD, it does polygon reduction if necessary and on render times processes full resolution mesh.

Lot of parameters to set here to adjust it to your hardware performance.

When it comes to instancing, Vue handles polys better then Carrara, I have scene with more then 4.2 trilions of them, and it renders rather quickly (with global ilumination turned on as well).

Down side of Vue instancing is that it still cannot distribute objects around entire sphere (automatically), for example, it kind of "projects" instances from above...

Trees in Vue could be better, with more controls and more different classes of plants, but overall, they look somewhat better to me then ones in Carrara.

Never used terrains in Carrara, cuz I usually do not do landscapes, but I had to in Vue. Procedural terrains (regular ones are there as well) in Vue are the absolute blast (hard to control, but still). They have basicly infinite amount of detail, and it varies depending of the distance from the camera. Above all that, displacement can be applied on them as well.

In general, Vue looks more mature as an application (I would not say PRO, becouse that is up to user IMO), LOT of features are refined and one feels there is nothing to add to them (SubSurfaceScattering, for example, it's more refined and capable in Vue's beta version, even unfinished, then one in Carrara5.1).

Well, there is something to add to it, and in fact that goes for every software out there: MORE SPEED...

That's it. I highly suggest downloading trial version, cuz only you can decide is it good for you or not. Cheers

daring · 4th January 2007, 15:05

Wow that was a pretty good analysis, LoneGunman. Thanks very much for that. Sounds like it may be worth it. The "MORE SPEED" part is enticing in itself. I will have to tryout the trial version.
Thanks again.

If you have more on your experience I'd like to hear it.

Well I just visited their site and I am blown away! 'nuff said!

WillBellJr · 8th January 2007, 20:03

I had a whole big discussion about that over at CGTalk:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=313047

I agree that Vue promises a lot that doesn't seem to deliver upon installation - I've still held off upgrading my Vue5i to V6.

I love what Terragen 2 is doing - even at the CTP stage; being able to move out from the ground to planet orbit is something I've aways wanted to do in my animations (and passing though a nice thick cloud layer going up or down!)

I felt Carrara was better because you can MODEL with it, loads Poser animations etc.

Unfortunately, I feel all of Eovia's great software is now left in limbo so I'm not sure what's going to happen to Carrara (figures all of this would happen after I BUY INTO it...)

Only time will tell if Carrara will continue to be a great alternative to Vue (as I felt C5 was to V5.)

-Will

daring · 8th January 2007, 21:15

Wow again! thanks Will for that link. That is a great discussion, even though it is a year old. But definitely influences my future decisions. I still have yet to truly put my Carrara to hard work. I do like its interface. It rules for work flow. And as one person in the discussion put it "that candy cane interface" to me is a turn off. Rendering quicker as well for me is a huge plus. Guess I need to put up with the bugs I have with Carrara on my mac, for now.

30th December 2006, 15:18	#1 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Carrara vs. Vue Does anyone have knowledge of Vue that the might be able to tell me the advantages vs. Carrara which I think is awesome, but doesn't seem to load and use large detailed textures into the Terrain editor well, over displacement maps. Don't get me wrong I love Carrara. I think it rocks to know end. I don't even have the pro version and utilize Hex with my lack of pro tools. Integrates well importing and exporting. But Vue sure looks impressive. Is it much higher end for a pro and can do much greater things than Carrara? Sure looks cool on their web site.

30th December 2006, 17:16	#3 (permalink)
Thomas Always learning new stuff Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Merignac, France Posts: 11,102 Images: 93	Yes, it was in the wrong section, I moved it. But to answer you, let the others do it, I'm not the specialist of Vue! __________________ Polyloop owner & Administrator - no support by PM or email. Polyloop [EN/FR] - Meuuh [FR +16 ans] - Totyo [FR] - Pixologic [JOB] - Le ZBlog [JOB] - La3dpourlesnuls [FR]

30th December 2006, 18:35	#6 (permalink)
lafnjack Cube Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 64	Hey Daring... I would think its more people having NOT worked with Vue, than anything else. I haven't worked with Vue at all. Out of curiosity, any reason you chose Vue over Bryce? I know a couple people here have mentioned Bryce. I started with Bryce myself. What are you looking for? Expansive terrain as something to animate or as a standalone picture? Character animation in a detailed terrain? John PS: Also, it is the holidays. People may be occupied. Give it a day or two. I could be wrong, and there could be a ton of Vue experts out there.

31st December 2006, 04:31	#8 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	I like Carrara, but a bit frazzeled I need a good landscape and tree program that animates well. Vue states they except billions of polys without a problem. Easily said. It's not until you buy it you find out that it doesn't work the way you had hoped. That's what I want to avoid, y'know? Carrara has got all the tools, but it seems to get slower and clumsier with every new element. I'm trying to do flyovers for golf holes and I have made it work to some success with Carrara. But when you design a golf hole specific to a Golf Course that exists then you can't just plop in a lot of trees. They have to represent what actually exists on the real live golf course. So I have acheived, like I said some success even though its a fictitious hole I'm creating for a sample. Now that I've got a great looking hole with a detailed grass pattern, I've dropped in trees where they may be located. NOW things are startin' to bug out on me. Now that I've got the camera going the way I look I try adding more trees or plants and weird things like: it shows there is a tree there but I can't see the tree only the manipulator handles. Too many polys? Now Carrara is bugging out? Maybe my texture is too complex? Is this possible? Also my preview of motion has slowed way down and I'm not nearly detailed as I want to be with 3d features (more Trees of varying types.) Now I did use duplicate which I believe does not add extra polys. Am I correct on that? Ya pretty complex. But I need a program that's gonna do the job, and able to keep from pulling out my hair in the process.

3rd January 2007, 19:22	#14 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	OK thanks for the advice - so does anyone out there know anything about VUE ? Last edited by daring; 3rd January 2007 at 19:35.

30th December 2006, 16:17	#2 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Maybe I'm writing to the wrong forum? Clue me in. Call me a noob, just don't call me a knob!

30th December 2006, 17:29	#4 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Thanks Thomas - you are a great moderator

30th December 2006, 17:31	#5 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	administrator - sorry, maybe I am a knob.

30th December 2006, 18:37	#7 (permalink)
medeamajic Now, I learn animation Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 1,026	Carrara can offer very good renders and unlike Vue it can also do figure animation. There was an article about Carrara 5 that stated the surface replicator of Carrara was better than Vue's. Vue is OK but you can only do landscapes unless you also have Poser. I don't think Vue has a modeler.

31st December 2006, 04:51	#9 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	To answer your question lafnjack I have used Bryce in the past. I have it on my "Mac", which is the only thing I use (not that Mac is better is just all I've used, never been an other than Mac User). I have Bryce 5.0 and can't get it to work at all with OSX. Why should I use Bryce? Because it's cheap? with little or no support. Maybe it would work better, guess I really don't know.

31st December 2006, 05:19	#10 (permalink)
medeamajic Now, I learn animation Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 1,026	The Open GL preview of Carrara works great if only one view is displayed. The size of the animation preview does not matter for Open GL. It can be a 640 X 480 preview or a 800 X 600 and the speed will be the same. With the Eovia software I can shrink my preview to 300 X 400 and it plays much faster. Perhaps you could try this for fly throughs to get the timing right. A Dual Core Pentium 4 at 3.4 GHZ or a Core 2 Dual at 2.130 GHZ should out perform an Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS with 512 MB of RAM if the preview is only 400 X 300. If the animation preview window is 1024 X 768 then Open GL will work better. If you have a fast system try the Eovia software at about 400 X 300 for animation previews and the playback speed should increase over open GL.

31st December 2006, 22:06	#11 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	GeForce FX 5200 on a G5 single processor 1.6Ghz. 3 gigs DDR sdram. I take it this would not be the ideal machine at this time. Well hopefully this year will bring a cool new one that'll indulge me in faster renders. That would help. I don't know if it'll remedy any of my Carrara bugs though. But thanks for the advice.

31st December 2006, 22:14	#12 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Here is what I have so far - for curiosity's sake. Feel free to offer suggestions. Thanks! http://drdesigncreates.com/testflite/testflite-4.html

1st January 2007, 02:01	#13 (permalink)
medeamajic Now, I learn animation Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 1,026	I used to have a P4 at 3.2 GHZ with a Geforce FX 5200 and 64 MB of RAM. I know your scene would bog down my old P4 system. You can get a custom built PC with a Geforce 7600 and a P4D at 3.4 GHZ for $800.00 or less. I now have a P4D (dual Core) at 3.4 GHZ and a Core 2 Dual (C2D) at 2.13. Both are light years a head of my old system. It is night and day. Your fly thoughs should not be slugish and play at 30 FPS in software mode (400 X 300) on either machine. When I use surface replicator on my new system I can have it duplicate an actual tree instead of only placing bounding boxes. A new system should help out but there will be a limit to how much a P4D or C2D can handle. I think both systems should handle your scene for animation previews at 30 FPS. You could post the Carrara file so I could test out the animation previews on my system at 400 X 200.

4th January 2007, 02:21	#15 (permalink)
LoneGunman SILO abuser Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Louisville, KY USA Posts: 556 Images: 23	I do Currently using Vue6Infinite/Beta for almost all of my renders... What would you like to know ? __________________ My missions are not impossible, I just make them look that way

4th January 2007, 04:01	#16 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	How does it rate up against Carrara in the terrain and tree areas. Usability?Does it handle hi poly counts well? Would you say it is more Pro? I kind of feel like Carrara could do better handling its trees on terrains.

4th January 2007, 08:03	#17 (permalink)
LoneGunman SILO abuser Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Louisville, KY USA Posts: 556 Images: 23	In general, Vue renders bit slower then Carrara, but, output has more depth to it. Antialiasing, however, is more complicated than it should be, and sometimes it fails on lower settings. Rendering has a different approach then Carrara, it is a farely advanced version of distributed ray tracing, first time seen in Bryce5, I believe. This tehnique produces far better soft shadows then one in Carrara, but it is time consuming (for those less patient, shadow maps are there). In my opinion Vue handles high poly counts very well, it has nice LOD, it does polygon reduction if necessary and on render times processes full resolution mesh. Lot of parameters to set here to adjust it to your hardware performance. When it comes to instancing, Vue handles polys better then Carrara, I have scene with more then 4.2 trilions of them, and it renders rather quickly (with global ilumination turned on as well). Down side of Vue instancing is that it still cannot distribute objects around entire sphere (automatically), for example, it kind of "projects" instances from above... Trees in Vue could be better, with more controls and more different classes of plants, but overall, they look somewhat better to me then ones in Carrara. Never used terrains in Carrara, cuz I usually do not do landscapes, but I had to in Vue. Procedural terrains (regular ones are there as well) in Vue are the absolute blast (hard to control, but still). They have basicly infinite amount of detail, and it varies depending of the distance from the camera. Above all that, displacement can be applied on them as well. In general, Vue looks more mature as an application (I would not say PRO, becouse that is up to user IMO), LOT of features are refined and one feels there is nothing to add to them (SubSurfaceScattering, for example, it's more refined and capable in Vue's beta version, even unfinished, then one in Carrara5.1). Well, there is something to add to it, and in fact that goes for every software out there: MORE SPEED... That's it. I highly suggest downloading trial version, cuz only you can decide is it good for you or not. Cheers __________________ My missions are not impossible, I just make them look that way

4th January 2007, 15:05	#18 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Wow that was a pretty good analysis, LoneGunman. Thanks very much for that. Sounds like it may be worth it. The "MORE SPEED" part is enticing in itself. I will have to tryout the trial version. Thanks again. If you have more on your experience I'd like to hear it. Well I just visited their site and I am blown away! 'nuff said! Last edited by daring; 4th January 2007 at 16:14.

8th January 2007, 20:03	#19 (permalink)
WillBellJr Extrusion Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 199	I had a whole big discussion about that over at CGTalk: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=313047 I agree that Vue promises a lot that doesn't seem to deliver upon installation - I've still held off upgrading my Vue5i to V6. I love what Terragen 2 is doing - even at the CTP stage; being able to move out from the ground to planet orbit is something I've aways wanted to do in my animations (and passing though a nice thick cloud layer going up or down!) I felt Carrara was better because you can MODEL with it, loads Poser animations etc. Unfortunately, I feel all of Eovia's great software is now left in limbo so I'm not sure what's going to happen to Carrara (figures all of this would happen after I BUY INTO it...) Only time will tell if Carrara will continue to be a great alternative to Vue (as I felt C5 was to V5.) -Will __________________ "With THIS!, you could be like GOD!..." - Kozer, Blake's 7

8th January 2007, 21:15	#20 (permalink)
daring Vertex Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: West Palm Beach, Florida Posts: 20	Wow again! thanks Will for that link. That is a great discussion, even though it is a year old. But definitely influences my future decisions. I still have yet to truly put my Carrara to hard work. I do like its interface. It rules for work flow. And as one person in the discussion put it "that candy cane interface" to me is a turn off. Rendering quicker as well for me is a huge plus. Guess I need to put up with the bugs I have with Carrara on my mac, for now.

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