Srtuggling with VUE & MS CE16

I have tried to use VUE renderer few times and I am shocked how unstable it is, considering that it should be the one and only rendering option for Microstation CE16.

- Roughly one times out of three Mirostation CE16 terminates without any warning when I start rendering (the program just closes itself in a fraction of second). 'Path render' option creates crap looking output and if I select ray tracer instead, even a simple model takes forever to render and the only way to cancel the rendering process is to power-cycle the computer. CTRL+ALT+DEL does nothing. Ray tracing just freezes the whole computer. I have a fairly new Dell Precision 5750 with Quadro RTX3000 & 64 GB of RAM and all other applications  except rendering with VUE work a breeze. Basically I am able to render a simple clay pot-syle model in CE16 & VUE without problem but any of my real life scale work porjects are absolutely out of question. I still have to render them with V8i (in some cases CE15 works also but it is more unstable than V8i in general) if I want to get job done.

- Furthermore, many dialog items in the VUE rendering dialog box are missing or they vanish occasionally. How is one supposed to adjust settings if tools and settings aren't there in the dialog? I have re-installed CE16 twice already and cleaned user preference files so it shouldn't be an installation-related issue.

Then about integration with VUE stand alone application & e-online plant catalog:

- I downloaded a demo version of stand-alone VUE application & Plant factory from e-online hoping that they would provide some sort of workaround or alternative to RPC cells which Bentely has removed from Connect Edition 16 but I can't find any documentation how integration between Microstation & VUE ecosystem materials is supposed to work. Why there aren't any guides or proper documentation available if these two applications should work together?

- I tried to create some trees with the Plant Factory. It seems to have plugins for almost every other 3D-modeling applications (Rhino, Maya, 3D MAx, Modo etc.) except not for Microstation. I wonder Why??? I thought that Bentley owns e-online so shouldn't there be sort of integration between VUE and Benley's flagship product Microstation?

- I exported a sample tree from Plant Factory to Microstation. The trees look besically ok but they are huge in size compared to RPC cells thus way too large for real time use. Furtehrmore, importing is not a drag and drop operation because orientation of Plant Factory trees differs from orientation of the Microstation Cells. They come sideways slanted instead of top view so, in order to use Plant Factory trees  I should rotate every single tree after placing them in Microstation model  - not very handy at all. It would be nice, if imported items would come to Microstation in correct orientation. Furtehrmore rendering them is another story because more than often, VUE will terminate Microstation if I try to render the scene...

All in all, I am shocked with the current state of the rendering engine and the poor documentation in general. The new rendering engine is unstable and works like a early beta version. Definately not ready for production use! It doesn't make any sense to push this kind of half baked rendering engine to end user who should use it for daily work with real life projects and earn some money from the clients.

I Just removed CE 16 and installed CE15 back in order to get Luxology back and it seems that I have to keep V8i tightly in use for foreseeable future. Art the moment VUE is practically in unuseable condition and it seems very unlke to me that it would be ready and reliable in the next Microstation update either because so many features are still in beta state. Maybe CE UPD 20 or 25 will be stable enough for actual design work? These updates should be thoroughly tested before they will be pushed to paying customers.

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