VUE renderer in MS CE 10.16.01.56 - still pretty much useless...

I downloaded the latest MS CE16 and tried to render some of my projects. Unfortunately, VUE still produces very, very poor results. Here is a couple of screenshots:

Demo no.1 - a view was rendered with Maxwell renderer (I have a token for Maxwell renderer for CE16). Rendering was slower than with VUE but materials look good and RPC cells render fine, too.

Demo no. 2 - The same view was rendered with VUE & path renderer. All materials look strange and RPC cells are gone...

Demo no. 3 - the same view was rendered with VUE & ray tracing. The image looks just as bad as demo number 2

I am seriously worried because my Maxwell token will stop working after 31.12.2021. That means, there is less than two months left and VUE is still pretty much useless for production...

  • Hello Paul,

    the messages you read are from users who have purchased software with an integrated rendering engine in which grass worked well and who now have an engine in their hand where you have to buy another software to have the same functions they had before.

    Grass is just an example, as Jan said we were also left without solutions on other functions, for example adding people or trees and we would need valid solutions for these uses, at least at the level of Luxology because up to 5 months ago we had them.

    I found VUE a valid engine, I made the render of a kitchen and I am quite satisfied:

    communities.bentley.com/.../275380

    apart from various bugs, such as sudden crashes, inability to hide the Area lights, Projection Group that does not work, Distribuited Render and Multiple render that do not save the images in previous render folder and then produce images without Relighting and NPR. I have already opened tickets for these problems and I hope they will be resolved soon.

    Returning to the grass topic, the Environment also provides that it can be exported from VUE Standalone, but some have been provided within Microstation. It would be correct to do the same with the grass materials, insert some of them into the materials supplied with Microstation.

    Regarding the SIG videos, I think I have watched almost all of them, despite this there would be a need for other educational videos, for example on the use of PBRs.

    Thanks: D.

  • Paul,

    I watched SIG videos (thank you Diego for providing me the link).  There was a Jerry Flynn's demo which briefly presented VUE ecosystems materials but it was only a very brief demo and I would say that it was far from sufficient considering that the whole rendering procedure is totally new. I hope that Bentely would provide better documentation. New features are useless if people don't know how to use them.

    And as Diego reminded, we still need a way to place natural looking and not too memory-hungry people, trees, shrubs and other kind of vegetation into our 3D-models and it would be nice to know how it is supposed to happen with VUE. Please show me to best procedure.

  • Jerry mentions in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGNxG3nRXLw at 1:29, that the tooltip should read "Refresh Thumbnails" rather than the current "Rrefresh Presets" (note the typo). A year later and this has not been done. It's this lack of attention to detail that makes me unenthusiastic about transitioning my rendering efforts to Vue (in addition to the necessity to purchase additional software for full functionality).

    Max

  • Hi Max, Take a tip from me and give up change to Lumion like I did, and most of your problems will be solved, average render time for a 7680 X 4320 image about one minute !!

  • Diego, we ar working to add some ecosystem materials as part of the MicroStation standard material library and address all bugs that are being found.