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Insydium Sneak Peeks - 2022 (Terraform, Mesh tools)


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8 hours ago, HappyPolygon said:

 

he seems to have a love/hate relation with Maxon, reading his bio he has been developing a lot of plugins. Some were sold to other companies, one was bought by Maxon itself, later he worked for Maxon but left to work solo again before selling Terraform to Insydium and working for them,... well the pattern of what he will do next is obvious.

 

Trying to figure out what you are insinuating here. Over 6 and a half years at Maxon and almost 4 years at Laubwerk. And making his own C4D plugins. I see no hate anywhere. I just see a passion for creating plugins for C4D and getting paid to do so. People change jobs for various reasons. 

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59 minutes ago, Cairyn said:

Interesting. The wording "infinite" suggests that it is not a polygonal subdivision but some rendertime effect?

 

Yes the geometry is calculated on render time. It's the same principle used in fractals. In fact the formula generated terrain is a fractal.
I guess they also use an adaptive bailout/iterations system to balance the render time and detail between close-ups and zoom-outs.

Vue was very unstable. It got better now.

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8 minutes ago, kbar said:

Trying to figure out what you are insinuating here.


I mean he is constantly in an unstable relationship with Maxon.

OK the love/hate situation is not too fitting here. It seems like he want's to be close to Maxon but not too close... It's like he cannot make up his mind if he wants to be an independent developer or work for someone else.
As I see the timeline of his career I feel sad that eventually he is giving away his intellectual property for others to manage and profit. I guess it's a character thing, like some artists that get too attached to their creations and don't want to sell them and others that are so productive that they sell everything without keeping copies. 
Anyway, I also feel sad to find out that he worked in Maxon and eventually left. We could be having a terrain editor in C4D if he didn't.

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17 hours ago, Cairyn said:

 

Interesting. The wording "infinite" suggests that it is not a polygonal subdivision but some rendertime effect? It'd be interesting to see a camera movement and zoom to judge how seamless the added detail is blended. Of course, the simulation to shape the terrain would still be discrete...

 

On the other hand, I had quite some bad experiences with Vue and C4D some years back, with massive and frequent crashes, and even after I had given up on Vue I heard from others that these issues persisted. Not sure whether I would pick that up again. (Also, only subscription? Then I'd stay away from it anyway.)

I also had a bad experience with Vue xStream.  Extremely slow and constantly locked up.  But if you had xStream then you could also run it in stand alone mode and there I had no issues.  Unfortunately, you did pay a premium for xStream and to have it be so frustratingly slow and unstable was horrible.  There was a plugin in C4D that used 6 orthogonal cameras which were perfectly aligned to generate a sky box so I was using that plugin and xStream to create sky boxes (another software program converted those 6 square renders into a spherical sky map).    That was about all I was using xStream for because the spectral atmospheres was pretty cool and far more realistic than that sky shader C4D had.

 

This was back in 2015 prior to the Bentley acquisition, the e-on site hack, and essentially no upgrades for 2 years.  So it was pretty easy to walk away from.

 

But I have kept my eye on it as working with Vue stand alone was a nice experience.   Still no love for subscriptions though.

 

Now take a look at the Bentley web-site.  They do not even list Vue as one of their products.  They only list LumenRT which was once part of e-on.   Bentley is all about construction and industrial design and project management software.  Vue is the red-headed step child you don't talk about in that family.  Is there a commitment there to Vue?  Not really sure.  That is troubling. 

 

Honestly, if Maxon wants to grow Maxon One just a little bit more with another acquisition, I bet Bentley would sell Vue to them for a song.  Vue is coming on nicely with Redshift so who knows.

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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Hello all,

 

e-on employee here. While I am a private user in this forum, let me take this opportunity to answer some lingering questions / clear up some confusions raised in this discussion. I apologize for side-tracking the Insydium topic in this post and I hope the mods will forgive me for this.

 

Procedural terrains:

 

Yes, Cairyn and Happy Polygon are right. It's both a dynamic tesselation within the camera frustrum based on camera distance and a fractal formula, seamlessly blending between the different areas. Because this is a render-time only effect, the dynamic resolution is not exportable. To export a procedural terrain, you need to set the target export resolution and then it will be tesselated and baked accordingly into a mesh. If you have an infinite procedural terrain, you setup an export zone in the scene and everything within that zone is then exported as the terrain mesh at the target resolution.

 

Alternatively, you can export the generated heightmap instead of the mesh at the desired image resolution.

 

VUE vs. other terrain apps

 

Quote

I think it will soon start to loose ground again to GAEA and World Machine. As far as I know Vue still does not support erosion maps (to export) and still uses a sculpting environment with some elements of procedural terrain generation. The node and presets system GAEA and World Machine support, makes them superior to Vue as far as terrain generation is concerned.

 

Yes and no.

 

I'll admit that VUE terrains are not quite on par with the capabilities found in Gaea  / WM / WC. These applications have more specialized nodes such as folding, more optimized erosion algorithms (our erosion is an actual fluid simulation algorithm and thus slow) and a few integration things such as splatmap calculation or extracting fine terrain details as a separate normal map.

 

But VUE's terrains still offer nice results and they are fully node-based, whether you're using heightfield or procedural terrains. There are more than 60 different noises alone, going far beyond basic Voronoi and perlin stuff, and more than 140 nodes in total for usage across terrains and materials. Sculpting on top of the computed heightfield is possible, but optional.

 

Here's a random example terrain I just threw together in five minutes with very few nodes. In the screenshot, you can see the mask outputs from the erosion node which can be used for texturing. Other nodes offer masks outputs too.

 

Edit: Screenshot quality was crippled during upload, sorry 😞

 

image.png.162a5ea0f127dc1da8564604cb40fbc6.png

 

image.png.742e15f4c0d748cfbb4fe5d8673ecb62.png

 

The masks can be exported, although it requires a bit of a workaround (you need to connect the mask output to the terrain altitude output instead of the main output of the heightfield graph. Then you can export the result from the terrain editor). We are working on a proper export method as well as on new terrain features for the future.

 

Integration plugins (former xStream product line)

 

The plugins used to be quite unstable in the past, so I understand the negative experiences you have had. However, this was a long time ago (10+ years) and they have improved a lot, as well as the stability of VUE itself. I am not saying that you will not experience an occasional crash here and there, but it happens very seldomly.

 

One thing to note is that the plugins don't work like a regular plugin that would use the native UI of the host app and would be fully integrated. Instead, the plugins run as a sandboxed software-within-a-software where C4D, Maya or 3DS Max act as the "host application".

 

When you load a VUE scene (or create one from scratch inside of the plugin), you have to use VUE's World Browser and tools for handling objects and not the C4D Object Manager, Material manager and modelling tools. Everything displayed in the C4D object manager and in the viewport are low-resolution proxy objects that represent the procedural VUE meshes. So if you are editing a terrain in the VUE terrain editor, for example, but deleting the terrain proxy object at the same time from the C4D Object Manager, you will most likely encounter instabilities at best and a crash at worst, because the VUE terrain just lost its "representative partner" in the C4D scene. This means that deleting objects, assigning materials etc. needs to be done from within the floating VUE dialogues and you need to understand what you can do with native host tools and what you can't do. 

 

Aside from the creation process with the plugin, the focus of the plugins has shifted. In the past, there were no export capabilities and you could only render VUE scenes either inside of VUE or inside of the host app using the plugins and the native render engine (Standard / Physical in case of C4D). VUE elements and atmospheres were rendered by the VUE render engine and native elements by the host app. The renderers communicated with each other to match GI, light intensities and secondary rays such as reflection and refraction.

 

While this approach is still available in the plugins, it is not future proof and limited to the aforementioned native render engines only. This is why you can now convert any procedural element from the VUE scene into native C4D objects (as baked polygon meshes, with or without baked animation) from within the plugin, and the plugin will automatically create materials for the render engine that is currently selected in the C4D render settings.

 

Next to standard / physical in C4D, we support Arnold, V-Ray and most recently Redshift. Redshift is currently the most detailed conversion, where we recreate the parameters from the VUE material editor and map them to native Redshift nodes and settings in a Redshift material graph. Procedural materials are baked to texture maps and existing texture maps are just dumped to the project folder and linked accordingly inside the node graph. We are working on bringing Arnold and V-Ray conversion to the same level of detail as the Redshift conversion in one of the next versions. Currently, we link the main channels in these material conversions (roughness, diffuse, normal, AO etc.), but we do not recreate individual parameters in their native material graphs just yet.

 

As for the atmosphere, the sky can be exported as a HDRI in various shapes (cubic, panoramic...) and clouds can be baked to OpenVDB. So it's now possible to use the plugin for converting / exporting everything to another app or pipeline and then cutting ties with the original VUE scene altogether.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Daniel Seebacher said:

I'll admit that VUE terrains are not quite on par with the capabilities found in Gaea  / WM / WC. These applications have more specialized nodes such as folding, more optimized erosion algorithms (our erosion is an actual fluid simulation algorithm and thus slow) and a few integration things such as splatmap calculation or extracting fine terrain details as a separate normal map.

 

WOW, Vue has come a long way and got very powerful.

Thank you for sharing the technical aspects.

When I use Vue (french) and C4D (german) I feel multicultural ... (I didn't know Bentley acquired Vue)

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2 hours ago, HappyPolygon said:

 

WOW, Vue has come a long way and got very powerful.

Thank you for sharing the technical aspects.

When I use Vue (french) and C4D (german) I feel multicultural ... (I didn't know Bentley acquired Vue)

Whenever I talk to Daniel about Vue, I don't feel multicultural.  I feel completely stupid.  And not just about my preconceived notions concerning Vue from 6 years ago but also the entire landscape generation 3D industry as a whole!  His ability to explain Vue, e-on, and the industry in the clearest most concise manner possible just blows my hair back.  His explanation as to why xStream may have crashed C4D was news to me....and it makes complete sense.  I wish I had known that before.  But, as I said in a previous post, the whole move to increase export capability and the deep integration with Redshift is leaving me with only one concern about getting back into Vue again: their subscription program.  Unfortunately, there is not much Daniel can do about that.

 

Be sure to catch his training videos found here (a growing collection with the newer ones, particularly those discussing Redshift, belonging to him).

 

Dave

Sorry...but I simply do not have enough faith to be an atheist.

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On 3/16/2022 at 11:13 AM, HappyPolygon said:


I mean he is constantly in an unstable relationship with Maxon.

 

That is nonsense. 

 

On 3/16/2022 at 11:13 AM, HappyPolygon said:

OK the love/hate situation is not too fitting here. It seems like he want's to be close to Maxon but not too close... It's like he cannot make up his mind if he wants to be an independent developer or work for someone else.

 

Have you never changed companies before? Or had a personal project you wanted to spend some time on for a bit?

 

On 3/16/2022 at 11:13 AM, HappyPolygon said:

As I see the timeline of his career I feel sad that eventually he is giving away his intellectual property for others to manage and profit. I guess it's a character thing, like some artists that get too attached to their creations and don't want to sell them and others that are so productive that they sell everything without keeping copies. 

 

Making software is hard. Making a software business is even harder. If you really think that way then please make sure to buy any plugins you see, even if you don't need it. Since the number of plugin developers out there is shrinking on a daily basis. Otherwise all these independent developers will soon be gone. Leaving only the big names that you see today.

 

On 3/16/2022 at 11:13 AM, HappyPolygon said:


Anyway, I also feel sad to find out that he worked in Maxon and eventually left. We could be having a terrain editor in C4D if he didn't.

 

That product never would have happened if he stayed with Maxon. Again, you don't get to choose what to work on at a company, any company. And as you said before, why give away all your own intellectual property, FOR FREE, to any company if you can go out on your own and make it. Then sell it on to another company for a profit and still get to work on your dream project?

 

These notes are coming from someone who has worked for multiple companies (including Maxon) and for the past 13 years has focused mainly on Cinema 4D plugin development. C4D is fun, the community is fun. It doesn't have anything to do with what Maxon as a company is doing.

 

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