Posts Tagged ‘Vue’

…You’ll not like him when he’s angry.

My avatar was mistaken for a goblin’s mugshot and he really isn’t happy about it.  First he’s never been in trouble with the law.  So they don’t have his DNA, clawprints or photograph on file.  Secondly he’s not a goblin:  Goblins don’t have tails or wings – at least not the goblins he’s come across.

A quick post for a quick render – Sunrise City – my first proper test render with my new 64 Bit PC built entirely with it.  My last PC was supposed to be 64 Bit but there was a complication in the manufacturing (otherwise known as Dell used some 32 Bit parts thus rendering the whole box trapped in a 32 Bit body with 64 Bit RAM and Processor).   Anyway I’m now enjoying the 64 Bit life style.  This quick image was made by taking a quickly built Wizard City from CityEngine and dropping it into Vue 9.5 Infinite.  A few tweaks to one of the out of the box atmospheres to make it redder, to add a low cloud layer and to darken the buildings’ materials so they became stronger silhouettes and nine minutes later a larger version of the cityscape above was done.  Resources never dropped below 85% even with both Vue and CityEngine running at the same time.

I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a hundred and thirty-seven minutes of silly pirate fun. It missed some of the magic of the PotC: The Curse of the Black Pearl and lacked some of the elements that sustained PotC: Dead Man’s Chest and PotC: At World’s End. However better than some of the reviews I’ve seen that would suggest it was a far worse film than it is.

The big problem all the sequels to the Pirate of the Caribbean film have is that they will be compared to  the hit that the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was.  You’re never going to be able to recreate the impact of seeing Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow for the first time.

On Stranger Tides starts out well Jack impersonating a Judge could have been played for more laughs but that would have slowed the narrative down.  We’re quickly treated to Jack’s cracking escape sequence followed by Keith Richards appearance as Captain Teague and the cracking fight between Jack and Angelica’s impersonation of Jack.  Jack is Shanghaied by Angelica aboard Blackbeard’s ship we get into the meat of the film’s plot.

Everyone is off to sea in a race between three competing sides to get to the Fountain of Youth first. We have the Revenge with Blackbeard, Angelica, Jack and the missionary Philip against Pirate turned English Privateer Barbossa against the Spanish king’s expedition.

After fighting with mermaids, trekking through jungle, looking for a pair of chalices on a ship loaded with gold balanced on a cliff edge which should have had [Micheal Caine] aboard to say “hang on lads I’ve got an idea”, extracted a tear from a mermaid and had an encounter with the Spanish we get to the climax at the fountain.  Here we have a series of battles followed by a moral dilemma and a cliché that had been sitting around waiting to happen ever since Angelica explained the ritual earlier in the film.  The film wraps up leaving the surviving characters in various situations from which any and all of them can return for future instalments depending on the availability of the actors.

Overall a hundred and thirty-seven minutes of silly pirate fun.  Sadly I have a few quibbles …

My biggest one is that opening cracks along so nicely then once we leave the merry old England of Richard Griffiths’ King George the pace slows down a bit and never recovers.  The plot didn’t create any urgency to the rush to the fountain.  Blackbeard has the prophecy of his death, the English are trying to get there to claim it before the Spanish, Barbossa hopes to find Blackbeard there to take revenge and Jack’s interest has been set up in the earlier films.

Ironically the one thing that could have been used to add pace, the Spaniards intention of destroying the Fountain of Youth, wasn’t revealed and instead was used as  a bit of a damp squib twist at the end.  Had we known their larger, better equipped expedition was going to destroy it everyone else would have had a reason to rush to get their first.  The Spaniards’ were one of the film’s two missed opportunities.

The second missed opportunity was the relationship between Syrena the Mermaid, and Philip the missionary.  Rather than being the new Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann they were relegated to being the plot mechanic to get a mermaid’s tear.  Had Philip been more of a firebrand, possibly establishing the Spaniards’ religious intention to destroy the Fountain as a profane artefact, torn by his love for an inhuman mermaid he could have been a far more interesting addition to the film.  Instead we got a rather bland, more tea please, stereotype who stripped from the waist up presumably to provide some eye candy for the fans saddened by Orlando Bloom’s absence.

Blackbeard could have been a bit more villainous, a bit more irredeemable and could have made more of his swords power.  With Jack and Barbossa around Ian McShane needed to turn his performance up to 11 where as it was sitting around at an 8 or a 9.  His zombified, mystic henchmen also lacked something – they weren’t up to the skeletal pirates of the first film or even the fish men hybrids of the second and third.

My last quibble is that the final battle just didn’t pay off.  I’m not sure why not but it just lacked the energy of the opening.  If it had it could have redeemed the films other flaws.

Those are quibbles though.  I’ve seen far worse films but as I said already this has to compete with the three earlier films.  There were lots of positive things…

Jack Sparrow and Angelica had a real spar.  At times their chemistry lent towards being Carry on up the Caribbean with a high level of double entendre which fortunately really worked to establish them as a former couple who still have a spark.  It was a good idea to pare down the number of characters from the previous films, a few more cameos from smaller parts amongst crews might have been nice but losing lots of the bigger characters gave this story room to breathe.  The old relationships that remained between Jack, Barbossa and Gibbs all worked well.

As a Vue user it was really nice to see some top-notch landscape work with Vue.  I really couldn’t see the joins between virtual and real landscapes.  I may be wrong but I don’t think it was just spectacular jungle backdrops that had been produced in Vue this time but also I think some really nice rocks, cliffs and possibly a few cloudscapes might have too.

So overall I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides wan an enjoyable, Friday night, popcorn pirate movie.

What I really want to do now is watch Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl or play the Lego computer game…

A Vue 9.5 Infinite, CityEngine and SkinVue 9 Experiment

Click the Image to see Full Sized Version

Every time I hear someone talking about the latest Super Injunction I can’t help but think it sounds like one of the lesser known super hero comics.  Someone who comic fans love but the rest of us will only discover when they get a movie.

No one really knows who Super Injunction is except that he’s wealthy and has the power of (legal) invisibility.  Even in a picture like this one where he’s posing he ends up blurry and indistinct.  One of his biggest advantages is that his work clothes are also his costume.  No needing to find a phone box or worrying if the belly he’s started to get from too many good lunches at Michelin Stared restaurants will look embarrassing in the spandex.  Here he is pictured with Libel Woman another super hero who can be a bit grey and misused.

There is a slightly serious, practical side to this render.  I wanted to try out Vue 9.5 Infinite’s new  fast hybrid depth of field  2.5D algorithm in anger. I’ve not managed to get good results with the old depth of field methods but this new one seems to work really well and is fast enough for me on my 32 bit system.

The picture features Daz’s Victoria 4 and Michael 4 with textures enhanced using SkinVue 9, BC RoofTopper for the close up scenery and a CityEngine Wizard city modeled background.

One of the most popular pages here is Cloud Layer Sculpting in Vue and with all the new Vue 9.5 cloud features I thought I would be a good idea to blow the dust of it and rework it to use the new features.

Here is the original for comparison…

Update: I’ve been busy and I’ve posted a tutorial on how to do this and made a video tutorial to go with it too: Cloud Picture Made with Vue 9.5 Infinite.

So this is my first proper Vue 9.5 render post. A single cloud layer over an infinite procedural terrain with two texture layers controlled by altitude and slope angle. I sometimes feel I’m cheating a bit when I post one of these because Vue does so much of the work while letting me get on with the big picture.  Not really using any Vue 9.5 feature like the new cloud manipulation yet but still nice to see a new version can do the basics.

When I took this picture of buildings all jostling for space with each other on a Liverpool street I was going to just post it as a throw away picture post. However this was one of the views, with its variety of buildings from different eras, that inspired my render Accretion City. So I thought I might expand a little on the idea that pictures (especially 3D renders) need to be careful of avoiding mono culture scenery. I really like CityEngine (I think my reviews of CityEngine Indie and CityEngine Vue made that pretty obvious).

A lot of 3D scenes reveal their artificial nature because they use the same elements over and over again. I can’t remember which film it was but I do remember one of the 3D cartoons with insects films a few years ago where all the background insects looked the same. Every time I saw a group of ants in the background I knew I was watching a CG movie and it pulled me out of the story.  Vue users have become so used to EcoSystems they almost forget the power the variety gives in making scenes more believable through variation.

The sample scenes are great but they tend to create models of settlements that are very mono culture in nature. Even when they feature different types of area they tend to be of one era. CityEngines way of creating models of a city is great but they aren’t settlements that grow over time – and trying to making them do that is a task that would scare me and probably wouldn’t have huge benefits. So the trick will be to include a variety of building types to make it seem a model has grown over time. That will include creating models that fuse multiple styles so the old can be extended sometimes in a way that would have Prince Charles talking about carbuncles if these were real buildings.

Anyway somewhere along the lines before I’d finished writing what should have been a complete post I was struck by how I don’t just think this way for 3D stuff but also when I’m world building for stories or games. In fact I went as far as writing up a formalised way of doing that when I put together STEEPVM. Thats quite a formal method and I know that most of the time the ideas for a setting layer themselves by accretion until, hopefully, I have something believable.

Thankfully I don’t have to create some sort of procedural set of instructions for this to work. However I do have to be careful of the trap that lies in wait – a curate’s egg setting.

It is far too easy to be lured by lots of shinny, shinny ideas and to throw them all into a setting and be left with a mess. I hate to pick on one particular target but the RPG Waste World seemed to me to suffer baddly from this.  On the flip side I was really pleased when Nightfall Games posted on their new(ish) forums that they won’t be updating SLA’s technology because at the moment, for me, its achieved a level of accretion without tipping over into being a mess.

I was starting to write something about that when I remembered I’d written Leave out the (Steampunk) Kitchen Sink last year so I’ll not go back over that old ground again…

I reviewed CityEngine Indie last week, here is my review of CityEngine Vue.  If you read last weeks review I’ll not apologise for lifting large parts of it with only minor changes as there are only minor differences between the two products.  CityEngine Vue is exactly the same underlying software as all the other versions of CityEngine.   The only major difference is that CityEngine Vue is restricted to exporting Vue’s vob file format so you have to load the model into Vue.  All the other features are the same but you pay $196 less ($296 less if you’re a C.Club member at Cornucopia 3D)!

CityEngine is a procedural modelling programme for the automatic generation of cityscapes.  Using one of the example projects supplied or the CityEngine wizard you can generate a textured city model in a dozen clicks.  You can then export it to Vue Vob format to load into Vue.  This version is compatible with all Artist and Professional versions of Vue 9.  It is also compatible with all Artist and Professional versions of Vue 8.4 and Vue 8.5 with a build # higher than 51429 only but imports are limited to 128 materials.

Moving beyond the examples and the wizard the first thing most users are going to want to do is to create a city of their own.  The model is built based on elements you can control.  The street network and associated lots controls the layout of the city.  Obstacle, attribute and height maps can be used to shape the model.  The allocated Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) file tells CityEngine how to create and texture buildings, streets and other elements of the model.

The first obvious step down that route is with the roads themselves.  You can hand draw a road network in CityEngine with its tools. Street networks can also be imported from AutoCAD DXF (dxf), Esri Shapefile (shp) or OpenStreetMaps (osm) files.  Depending on the source you’ll probably need to spend some time tidying up some of the roads and junctions by hand.  Fortunately, while that can take some time the tools, for doing that are easy to use and quick to master.

CityEngine also has a road generation tool to expand on your street network.  For a fictional cityscape I found this a great time saver.  Simply fill in the main routes and then let city engine create the fine detail of side streets and back ways.  You can fine tune the sort of network it builds which is a great help in creating the layout you’re looking for.  Once the road network has been created it will generate the lots inside them.  You can allocate a CGA file to all or part of your network and then have CityEngine generate the models from it.

After generation the city isn’t set in stone.  You can edit the street layout using the same tools as were used to create it.  Redrawing streets reorganises the lots and the buildings are then regenerated to fit the new lots.  You can see this happening live in the display as you drag streets around – a really fun and useful feature.  If you don’t like a particular building you can select the lot and have it generate a new seed number to create a different building randomly or enter values for the attributes of the building to manually shape it.

Obstacle maps can be used to prevent the generation of streets or buildings in inappropriate areas.  This is particularly useful for stopping buildings or random streets appearing in the middle of rivers, parks or where you want to add models built in other 3D software.  You can also set up attribute maps that control values used to generate the models.

Attribute maps, which simply colour channels in image files, to control the types of buildings in particular areas or to control attributes of a building.  So you can use these to create zones in your city of industrial, residential, commercial or park land.  By controlling attributes you could set limits on buildings heights, specify level of detail or the texture sets to be used depending on the attributes used by the CGA file that describes the buildings in your model.

The textures generated are simple UV bit maps.  There is currently no support for separate layers for bump, luminosity, reflection or other effects.  Although the resulting models will look ok for the best results (as with any model imported into Vue) the results can be dramatically improved by enhancing or replacing the textures inside your rendering package of choice.

Another quibble with the exported model is the lack of options for exporting the heightmap based terrain the model in a way that makes them easy to align to the city model.  Although it isn’t impossible to do this by trial and error or by adding markers into the model at the terrain’s corners this process could be easier to achieve.

The facade engine is marked as being a beta feature.  I have managed to achieve reasonable results with the tutorial facade but I found a couple of evenings working with this feature with my own photograph to be quite frustrating resulting in poor results.

Computer Generated Architecture is really at the heart of what CityEngine does.  This is the file that tells it how to procedurally construct the settlement for you.  CityEngine provides two ways to work with these either as text or as a node network.  The node network will be familiar to users of other software where similar tools are used for creating procedural textures or in XFrog plants.  By adding and connecting nodes rules for producing simple or complex models can be defines.  Under the hood the text file defining your city is being written for you.

The node based approach will appeal to a lot of users who are scared of programming.  Personally since I’ve been programming for thirty years I’m quite happy to dig into a new programming language so I’ve spent a lot of my time digging into the text version of CGA.  There are tools to help with making working that way easier too including grammar checking as you work and code highlighting.

Whichever way you work the underlying rules are doing similar things – CGA rules split up, align, move, scale, rotate, extrude, colour and apply textures to shapes.  There are also rules that can add various gable, hip, pyramid or shelf roofs to a building.  They can also pull in external models to add them into a scene – so, for example, you can models street furniture in another programme and them add them automatically to the city.

Unlike traditional modelling where you work with splines, faces or other representations of a single model what you are doing in CityEngine when you work with CGA file is teach the software how to build a whole variety of models for you.  By including random elements the models can have variety so you don’t end up with a city of identical structures but something far more akin to the real world.

There are a variety of sample CGA files that are available to download covering modern, historical and science fiction cityscape production.  Procedural have also provided an extensive set of video tutorials and documentation to support the software and to really help you get into understanding CGA.

Now I don’t think CGA will be for everyone.  When I first started working with 3D if you wanted to include a person in a model you had to model and texture the meshes for them from scratch.  Since then you’ve been able to use software like Poser to work with figures or buy pre-made meshes.  Over time I’d expect the same sort of ecosystem of hobbyists selling and giving away the CGA files  to emerge as has happened with Vue, Poser and pretty much every other kind of 3D software I use.

On paper CityEngine Vue’s major differences from the CityEngine Pro and CityEngine SE are minor.  Like Indie it lacks Python features – since the versions that do have Python are out of my price range I’ve not looked at what it can do with Python in detail but most of those features seem to relate to enhancing export and workflow.  Only CityEngine Pro offers a floating network licence which is unlikely to be an issue for most hobbyists.

My only other concern regards CityEngine’s stability.  I’m running on a 32bit system and, when working with larger models or models with lots of detail, I’ve had a few crashes and times when the CityEngine’s performance has become sluggish.  As with all 3D software I’ve ever used users have to understand there systems limit and work out how that affects the scale and detail of the model they produce.

Hopefully future releases will see a more usable façade engine, more advanced texture options and easier export for matching terrains in other packages.

Overall I’d have to say  CityEngine Vue is a brilliant piece of software.  If I’d known it was coming out I’d have bought it rather than City Engine Indie.  If you just want to work with CityEngine and Vue it’s the perfect choice.  I said in my review of CityEngine Indie that the features included for the price are amazing: well CityEngine Vue’s features are astonishing for the price.   If you want to create scenes of human habitation in Vue, from a simple village to a town to a full cityscape, CityEngine Vue is the ideal complement to Vue’s nature simulations.

I’ve tried to create a picture like this for some time – a cityscape with layers of different types of building like real cities have. I started this attempt earlier today and I think its my best attempt to date. Its built up of several CityEngine created models and a few from Cornucopia 3D. The foreground is the new Favela Houses at Cornucopia 3D along with some basic Vue plants. The mid ground is buildings created using the CityEngine Paris 2010 project. Behind that is a narrow row of CityEngine’s science fiction WizardCity and the tallest towers are from the modern city project.

I’d like to have included some cars and people in the foreground and possibly a plane in the sky but my 32 bit system couldn’t really cope with anymore models in the scene once I assembled it in Vue 9.

Google may want to organise the Web – I just want to organise my website.  So since I had a couple of freebies for Vue floating around on Too Many Ideas without a proper home and I think I may have some more on the way I’ve made a new home for Free Vue Objects downloads.