I tried to do some renderings with Microstation 2023 hoping that Vue rendering engine would be more reliable in this version but no. Ecosystem materials either work or not and using them will terminate Microstation several imes per day while rendering. This is so frustrating... VUE rendereing is so unstable and without proper field or lawn materials the new rendering engine is pretty much useless for us.
Bentley, could you kindly fix these issues. We can't render with Microstation if it crashes all the time. It wastes so much time. The rendering engine should be stable and robust so that it can handle langer models as well.
Here is my latest test with Ecosystems materials.It is a simple flat 2D-model where I have attached some textures for rendering and placed some 3D trees & playground elements on the flat surface. Ecosystem materials actually look quite ok but rendering them is a nightmare. Sometimes they render fine but more than often, the material just dissappears and vue renders a dull surface without any material attachment instead. Material 'Lawn without weeds' I managed to render twice in the beginning but after that it never appeared to the rendered image. Lawn with dandelions renders occasionally. Sometimes Microstation will terminate when I press the 'render' button in Vue rendering window. You newer know for sure will Microstation render the image or not or does the image come with all materials attached. Ecosuystem materials do have potential but the rendering engine should be far more robust and reliable .
Hi Yrjo,
You are correct the VUE render engine should not crash when you press the render button. Bentley needs to capture these exceptions so the developers can get to the root of the problem. MicroStation 2023.1 should be available at the end of the month and it will have some fixes for VUE, especially regarding the Fast Preview render crashing when editing materials.
I did not see very many crashes while doing regular renders but the machine I was using had 64GB of memory. I suggest using Task Manager to monitor your memory usage during a render it could be you are running out of memory. Also since you are using the path tracer you should make sure that your graphics card drivers are current.
I think your rendering looks great. Are you enabling gamma correction? VUE uses 2.2 whereas Luxology uses 1.7 I would try setting this to 2.2 but beware I found a bug in that if you use 2.2 the render will display at 1.7 you will need to open the post render settings and make the change to display the render with a gamma of 2.2. Otherwise, the render will appear to be overly saturated or colors too vivid and not realistic. You might want to try the Natural Film Response tone mapper I use it a lot for exterior renders like this.
Cheers,
Jerry
Hi Jerry,
I like the consept of Ecosystem materials. They look nice in the renderings and have lot of potential for us landscape architects. The only issue is stability of the rendering engine, which I hope that Bentley would focus in the future.
Currently I have a Dell laptop with a Quadro RTX 3000 display card and 32GB of memory. I haven't observed memory consumption during the rendering process but usually when Microstation terminates it happens right after I have pressed the 'render' button. The other thing which almost certanly will cause Microstaton to crash is replacing an Ecosystem material with another. So, If I have an Ecosystem material assigned to some objects in my model and I want to replace it with some other Ecosystem material it is almost 100% sure that Microstation will terminate immediatelly, especially if I have rendered a view with the first Ecosystem material before replacing it with another. However, after restating the program replacing the material usually succeeds without issues.