VUE rendering

I have had MS CE Update 16 loaded for about a week now and have been trying out the VUE rendering with very little success!

I have been using Microstation for close to twenty years now and although I'm far from an expert on creating rendered images of our ships I believe, in the past, I have had been able to get reasonable results with previous editions of Microstation. In addition I was able to pretty quickly adapt to any changes as updates were loaded. However, so far getting any sort of reasonable results from Update 16 and the VUE rendering engine really has me perplexed.  

Below is an image created using the Luxology rendering engine from my pre update 16 version of Microstation and below that an image of exactly the same view with the exact same materials and lighting using the VUE render engine. To my eye the first image is acceptable and the second image is complete rubbish. On top of that, the Luxology render took about 4 minutes to render and the VUE version  nearly 29 minutes and pretty much stopped me from doing any other operations on my computer whilst it was processing.

Has anyone else had similar problems and more importantly is there an easy fix that I'm missing here? 

Parents
  • Hi Gordo,

    Did you try using the path tracer to render this? If not try it using the Exterior Good render setup. I would l also recommend you lower the water's bump intensity a bit from what you have. Physical sky in Luxology is not really physical so the difference you see in the color in VUE render is the lower sun angle will be warmer color. You can change this behavior by adjusting the decay amount for the Afternoon atmosphere the default is 20% try using 5% instead. The path tracer will be much faster to render than the ray tracer for this scene and provide superior results.

    Cheers,

    Jerry

Reply
  • Hi Gordo,

    Did you try using the path tracer to render this? If not try it using the Exterior Good render setup. I would l also recommend you lower the water's bump intensity a bit from what you have. Physical sky in Luxology is not really physical so the difference you see in the color in VUE render is the lower sun angle will be warmer color. You can change this behavior by adjusting the decay amount for the Afternoon atmosphere the default is 20% try using 5% instead. The path tracer will be much faster to render than the ray tracer for this scene and provide superior results.

    Cheers,

    Jerry

Children
  • Hi Jerry,

    Many thanks for the reply.

    I had tried Path Tracing initially but the early results were not encouraging so skipped to experimenting with Ray Tracing which did seem to produce a better result but very slow. Here is the same view created this morning with Path Tracing and the adjustments you suggested.  The render time was just over 5 minutes which, as you suggested, is dramatically faster than Ray Tracing.

    I am using the "Afternoon" atmosphere and with this one, the decay amount is turned down to 5%. Reducing the decay amount helped a lot. I also halved the water bump. Doing the view in Path Tracing seems to completely remove the texture in the water. For my work in the past I have a completely separate "Water" design file set up and just use it as a reference when I need to render a vessel scene. When I first started using the Luxology render engine, it took me a quite a while to get the water to look the way I wanted, I'm sure I will get there again with VUE but speed of rendering does take up a lot of time trying to get it right.  

    After posting last week and before your reply, I continued battling away with the much slower Ray Tracing with the render quality set at "Exterior Best" and managed to get a reasonable result but it was really slow. I saved the image but unfortunately I deleted it from the history. It would have taken well over an hour to do that Ray Tracing image.  

    I will continue to experiment with the Path Tracing today but any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks

    Gordon

  • Thanks Jerry,

    this is excellent advice. Sorry if I join the discussion, is there a way to increase the brightness of the environment? Unfortunately, with tone mapping I quickly reach full scale even though the image is still very dark.

  • Hi Diego,

    Are you using Reinhard tone mapper? Try using it if not already and you will need to add some contrast.

    Cheers,

    Jerry

  • Hi Jerry. 

    I did eventually manage to work my way through this issue with help from a number of sources and am now producing much better results. 

    In the process of working this out, our IT manager has been doing some research into upgrading GFX card on my machine. One question he has asked me is if I can find out if Microstation will support "consumer grade cards" for raytracing of just workstation cards only? 

    Any advice would be appreciated.

  • Hi Gordon, Ray-tracing is CPU bound so the graphic card won't help there. Our Path-Tracing uses OpenCL and a consumer grade card (like a GeForce or AMD Radeon) should work well as long as they have support for OpenCL. General MicroStation uses DirectX and I think nowadays any good graphic card will work well with DX.