open discussion Carrara vs E-on-Vue vs Terragen
Luftsturmregiment40
Posts: 328
As Vue is down for ages acquired by Bentley I can't see it will be resurrected - I think Bentley quietly killed Vue
besides...
can we discuss the pros and cons of Carrara as a landscape software in comparision with Vue, and Terragen (Bryce does not support latest macOS that's why we should leave it out)
render quality (still and animation)
render speed (still and animation)
object import / export
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Vue, Terragen and Bryce are all dedicated to landscapes/environments, rather than an all round 3D suite with tools for modelling rigging texturing animating and rendering.
landscapes, oceans and environments can be done well in carrara, ...see the store for examples.
Carrara has a plant system where you can create a variety of trees, bushes and plants,. you can also model plants in the vertex modeller and create leaves, blossoms, berries or fruit models which can be used in the plant system.
Render quality depends on the objects, shaders, lighting and render settings, and also on the render engine used,. Carrara has a good quality, fast render engine but also has render engine plugins for LuxRender and OctaneRender.
Render speed depends on all of the above and the settings on your render output options,.. still/animation .
Carrara can import and export OBJ ,. there is a plugin available for OBJ sequence import,. and another for OBJ sequence export
Hope it helps :)
I have never owned Vue, but I tested using the trial version many years ago...somewhere around Vue 7? I thought because it was a dedicated landscape software it would handle flickering foliage better in animations - ha ha!
Render times were outrageous from my end...maybe unfair to say since it was so long ago and at that time I had a single processor machine. Plus the price. I think you can get great results from Carrara from what I have seen here over the years.
Plus, everything 3DAGE just said above.
PS
I forgot my own recent experiements with the Realistc Sky editor. It bugged me forever that the shadow colors were so lifeless, but turning up the Blue Filter under Atmosphere really helps, along with dialing down Red and Green. The controls are kind of sensitive, though.
Landscape replicated using a Replicator set to Grid.
I have no experience with Terragen, but I have read on another software forum from someone who is obsessed with clouds that the render times are also painful, but of course, may depend on your system. We do have Volumetric clouds in Carrara.
wow, you think Vue is really Kaput?
I know they had a major breach that resulted in a site shutdown a few months back, but shutting down the entire company? or did I read that wrong?
(do you have any links to the current 'story'?)
I thought Vue was pretty impressive, but the 'complete' package I had didn't do alpha layer rendering, so I dumped it, and it wasn't that much better than the tools I was using for my projects at the time. At the time, the Poser integration/bridge was important to me too. I guess it's still in there.
I do hate to see players like Vue fall off the edge though. I hope I'm understanding this wrong. They've also got some tree (tree factory?) and particle tools (carbon scatter?) that looked pretty capable ($$).
I now see the mention of Bryce (macs notwithstanding), which in the right hands can do some amazing stuff, but probably wouldn't surpass Carrara, given the same investment of time and experimentation. Bryce does have some shader tools that would blow minds if they could accessed by mere mortals using a more intuitive interface. Ironically, I believe Bryce was first released on the Mac...
Never used Terragen, but it was one of the tools that caught my eye when first getting into this 3D realm. From what I can tell it's much more alive (development) than Bryce or Carrara. Curious how it will fare in the long-term.
--ms
E-On Software and VUE are definately not gone. They are revamping and integrating with Bentley. I was able to get a new activation code for VUE and Plant Factory in less than a day from their Tech Support. They are opening their main site up soon. Also, their FB group is very active. They have recently issued an update for VUE 2016. VUE 2018 is rumored to be near completion (again, just a rumor).
I am very relieved, as my investment in VUE and Plant Factory, and the hardware to use for rendering, is substantial. Not that I have actually had time to use them yet...
https://info.e-onsoftware.com/blog/bentley-systems-announces-new-office-in-paris-france
https://www.facebook.com/eonsoftware/
I was sold on VUE after seeing some of the Demos, particularly the add-on called "Shimmerwind". The vegetation wind effects for VUE/Plant Factory are really impressive. I also have Carrara, and will be able to use the hardware for that, too.
Another popular program for terrain is World Machine 2. Apparently a number of CG professionals use it in combination with VUE, Terragen, etc., as it adds useful features.
I'd be surprised if Vue is dead. My understanding is that there are a fair number of high-end users (i.e. filmmakers) who use it, and can afford to pay the price for the top-end package. The current version of the software is still called Vue 2016, which makes it sound old, but it's still actively being developed: the latest release, R5, came out about six weeks ago -- end of March 2018 -- and included significant new features.
E-On Software did indeed have a major hack, disclosed in January of this year, which has left their website and the Cornucopia3D site pretty much in ruins. They're talking about rebuilding both sites "from the ground up", which I suspect means that whoever built the site for them originally has moved on, and they don't have the necessary expertise to rebuild and secure the existing site. But that seems to be a separate issue from their software development process.
So I wouldn't count Vue out. To be honest, a product that just got a new feature release six weeks ago actually looks a good bit more lively than Carrara (released in August 2013; last updated with a bugfix release in ... I can't remember, but it was a while back).
Now, as to the merits of the different bits of software ...
For my money, Carrara is the least capable of the three as a landscape modeler. Don't get me wrong: I love Carrara to death, I think it's an excellent tool, and I'd love DAZ to update it. I'm also impressed by the features it offers as a landscape modeler, which I think is an under-advertised feature of the software. I've made a bunch of landscape images with Carrara, and been pleased with them.
That said, I don't think it's in the same league as Vue or Terragen. The atmospheric engine is considerably less sophisticated; people like Tim Payne have done amazing things with Carrara in terms of pushing the envelope to make realistic skies but the output still doesn't come close to the kind of realism that Vue and Terragen offer. The terrain generation and texturing features of Vue and Terragen are also significantly better than Carrara's. Overall, other things being equal, Vue and Terragen will make richer, more realistic scenes than Carrara can manage.
Obviously, a great deal depends on the artist. A highly-skilled Carrara artist like Dartanbeck can do stuff with Carrara that will blow the doors off whatever I can accomplish with Vue, for example. Hell, Estevez is doing stuff with Bryce that I can't begin to even think about approaching with Vue. But I do believe that Vue (and Terragen) offer more powerful tools and better render-quality out-of-the-box than either Carrara or Bryce.
Carrara's advantage is probably speed: I can render a fairly ambitious Carrara scene in a fraction of the time that it takes for one of the others to grind out their meticulously photorealistic images. Plus, Carrara has a whole lot of other features -- i.e. modeling tools -- that the others don't offer. It also has better integration with DAZ content; it's easier to get DAZ content into a Carrara scene than into Vue, in my experience, and I think it often looks better. Vue requires a certain amount of texture tweaking, you can't pose the object after import, and I've never felt the results looked quite as good (possibly because I didn't tweak the textures enough).
With regard to quality, I think Terragen might just edge out Vue in terms of photorealism -- Terragen skies can be stunning -- but the learning curve for Terragen is so steep as to be practically vertical. Seriously. Vue is more like Bryce; you plop in some terrains, you slap on a texture or an ecosystem, you pick a sky from a library, and you're away to the races. Terragen, you edit function graphs. By hand.
Don't know what a function graph is? It's basically a collection of interlinked nodes where each node is a complex mathematical description of some feature of the image, such as a texture, or a terrain, or a cloud layer, or some aspect of the lighting or atmospheric model. The makers of Terragen provide a handful of pre-made components that you can insert into your graph, but after that you're on your own. It's seriously intimidating. I actually think Terragen is harder to use than Mojoworld (another function-graph-based landscape modeler, now sadly defunct). With Mojoworld, at least a semi-smart monkey like me could produce some moderately pretty images by poking around the UI until I got something that looked nice (and, Lord knows, the Mojoworld interface was not friendly or forgiving). Terragen is a whole different order of complexity. The results, when you get them, are gorgeous, but it's not for the faint of heart.
Vue, in my view, strikes a reasonable balance between ease-of-use and power. Where it doesn't strike a good balance is stability. It may be just a Mac thing -- I can't believe it could have sold so many copies if the PC version was equally unstable -- but the damn thing crashes all the time on my Mac. It's at its worst right after they put out a new major release: by the time they've put a few bugfix releases out, it tends to settle down a bit, but those initial releases, hoo boy, they're a mess.
In summary, I'd say that if Carrara is what you have, use it: you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much you can do with it. If you're not satisfied with that, consider moving up to Vue. I think the Studio package probably offers the featureset most comparable to what you'd get in Carrara or Bryce. And if you're the kind of brainiac who eats formulas for breakfast and is never happier than when you're tweaking parameters on a three-dimensional noise generator, go for Terragen.
And if none of those appeal, there's always ArtMatic Designer 7/ArtMatic Voyager or -- for Mac users on a very small budget -- TerraRay (which may not be in active development any more).
.
agreed, well articulated, non-'religious', and seemed well substantiated from a good number of years of actual use.
very meaningful,
--ms
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scenery_generator
has a nice list of scenery generators, Carrara blatantly and undeservedly absent
TerraRay is a very cheap Bryce like alternative for Mac users I stumbled upon available at the app store
I have Vue11 complete and it's an awesome software for environment rendering as it's very realistic.
Some movies have used Vue like Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull but it needs some time to find your way in.
It's similar like Daz Studio, so it doesn't really have a modeller, you can use and download content from the website and put it in a scene together to set the scene.
click video
OK challenge
which software could best recreate this teaser from Besthesda?
.
I already tried using Skyrim as a render engine
all my Creation kit imports give an error even though they work in Nifskope
can hope this new one has an easier system when it finally is released
.
@Selina, I've sent you a PM.
.
or sending naughty renders of Brash Lonergan's extra bits
The E-ON software folks have moved into the Bentley Systems offices. Just had a 50% off sale on the VUE artist series (not Infinite, unfortunately,) and the Plant Factory series.
.
Moxie has dibs on Brash's naughty bits. If Selina has been a good girl this year...
.
I know I posted this in another thread discussing Vue, and I know this is a pretty old thread, but I feel it necessary to speak up for the sake of others. Please hear me out. And please, moderators, don't hammer me for posting this again here so that others will be more likely to see it.
For those considering returning to Vue, I want to share my personal experience from the days of the Bentley purchase. I was on the maintenance plan, so that I could get the upgrade to 2016 when it was released. That version was released much later than it was due, and by the time it was, E-on had taken many more months of fees than they were supposed to take. I had a lot happening to me at the time, so I didn't notice for a while, but when I did, I saw they had over 6 months of extra fees they'd charged me. I went to them and insisted on a refund, which they refused to do. Let me be clear in stating that everything I'm claiming in this post I have the emails to back up recording conversations between us. I don't wish to make those public at this time, but if I'm pushed into a corner, I will.
Finally, after threatening to embarrass them in social media, they relented and refunded me the extra money. But upon doing so, they told me not to tell anyone. I can only guess why they would do such a thing, but the fact that I've read others' stories about how all their months of maintenance only got converted into a one month subscription on the new plan, I felt I should speak up. I could tell a few other details that would embarrass them further, but I'm not about that. I'm about warning you that if you do business with them, you do so at your own risk knowing that they were fine taking money on a monthly basis from people for plans where customers had already completed payment in total, refusing to give refunds, and keeping things hush-hush when they did. Let's remember that at the time, they weren't on a subscription model but a monthly maintenance plan that was supposed to end once you paid the total amount for that year. The 2016 release was way, way off schedule.
When I reached out to them, the person responsible for the changes lied to me and told me he had nothing to do with E-on. This was the guy who was going to all of their industry seminars as a representative for E-on and Bentley. Now, if they were willing to lie and cover up inappropriate handling of customer purchase monies, how are we to trust they were subject to a cyber attack? I can't prove it, but it just sounds like another of their stalling tactics to me.* That's my opinion, and in no way is meant to be taken as fact.
I'm sharing this now so that others will be well-informed before getting into any long-term agreements with this company. I'm not interested in getting into any debates over this. I'm simply presenting information for the benefit of others.
*And if the cyber attack did actually happen, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do such a terrible thing.
glad I saw this
how do I cache a post for internet archive
well I tried hope it worked
Thank you for sharing. I hope it helps others.
if it wasnt so pricey would be tempted by cinema4d + vray
ya got any cache on the jiggle plug in?
i completely missed it's intro, don't know what it can do
That should still be on the web
I was afraid this wouldn't be for long
From a technical standpoint, the most challenging thing I see here is the sky and the clouds. Pretty much any terrain generator can produce those peaks and pretty much any software with instancing can produce the vegetation from the distance viewed in this sequence. And if the sky is a mere imported backdrop, then again ANY software could likley do it. However if the clouds are rendered 3d clouds, then probably the best bet is Terragen. While Vue outshines most landscape generators in most areas no one that I have seen can really compare to Terragen in terms of cumulus style cloud groupings.