I tried it briefly, but I didn't find it that much different than previous versions. How'd you get the ecosystems working? I couldn't see the option for it in the material editor or the paint option. I thought it was an option that you had to pay extra for. Anyone else able to access it? One problem I did find was with the function editor. This is probably the most important terrain creation tool but any changes I made didn't seem to have an effect. Anyone else get this?
I actually thought the renderer was a bit quicker but as I say I haven't used it all that much, maybe I'll give it a bit more time.

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I just applied an ecosystem material and hit the auto populate button when it prompted me. seemed to work fine but afterwards it was too slow to work with at all. I tried a lower amount of instances with the same result. In vue 6 infinite the interface is alot faster and you can see objects intersect in the viewports which is usefull when you want a tree to not be floating above the terrain you know. In vue 5 and now this beta you can't tell where objects are in the viewports. Even without these glitches I can't actually see anything new either. There may be more presets and foliage options in the expensive versions but thats just adding content. I could see myself using the xstream version for some things if it performs as well as the video they have on the site. but I don't understand whats going on with this beta and the relationship between e-on and cornucopia3D.

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I haven't used it and I probably wont. I always felt that it was kinda wrong that programs like poser and view exist because it perpetuates that "click the button" stereotype. On the other hand how do you go about creating sprawling landscapes in 3d without a tool like this?!?

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well, I agree it does make it simpler to create landscapes, but its not exactly easy to create really good images with it especially as it is so very slow and cumbersome to work with and render. Creating comparable landscapes in max is so much easier if you've found the displace modifier and a noise map. the big difference is that distributing and rendering that many instances of tree models will just make max crash. in Vue it just takes about a year to render it. I think for generating backgrounds or maybe rendering chunks of forrest for a matte painting Vue is something I have there as an option. but I hate the way they advertise it, and I quote:

" No need to worry about perspective, lighting or shadows: the software takes care of all this for you.
All functions are only a click away: one click to create a terrain, one click to grow a new plant, one click to add 3D text, etc.

The xstream plugin could be usefull in cases where you have an exterior max scene with buildings and terrain etc. and you want to add in heaps of foliage. if the render times are acceptable and you have a deadline it could improve a shot significantly. plus the trees can be animated in a realistic way. That is really the only reason I'm interested in trying out this new version of xstream but with the render times as slow as they are in Vue 6 its just not worth it unless you had a farm or something which defeats the point entirely. you might as well just use a 64bit version of max and some ridiculous amount of ram and use geometry generated in max.

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It's good for still images and backgrounds but I probably wouldn't want to do any animations in it because of the time it would take. I do have a bit of a soft spot for this program, though I've never come across a situation where I absolutely had to use it. As you guys have said, there are ways of doing most of it in max (apart from the ecosystems).

Also I found the ecosystems in pioneer. Would I be correct in saying that you can use the provided ecosystem materials but can't edit them or create your own?

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yeah it seems that way, I've got a certain fondness for Vue also, just as a fun thing to play with really, its got quite a lot of potential. I'm pretty keen on the idea of procedural foliage generation. like that Ivy program. It would be great if someone made a plug in for max that allowed you to grow and paint plants from both model libraries and your own meshes and perhaps procedurally driven randomness and growth like the ivy generator that would be cool.

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I was pondering this discussion this arvo and decided to see what I could come up with in Max without spending too much time on it. The result is below. Conclusions? You can do decent looking terrains in Max but you'll have to spend a bit of time on it. 95% of the terrain was done with the displacement modifier and various noise maps. It looks ok, but it would look better if you hand painted a displacement map in photoshop so it would look like a mountain range and not just a bunch of noise maps. All the textures are procedural, again, various noise maps. The trees are done with the free version of easynat. To save on polys I used billboards and you can certainly tell. If you had an awesomely powerful machine you could probably use higher detail models but I was getting crashes with the billboards (1500 instances) so I had to render it out in layers. It's not the best image, I reckon I would have got better results if I'd spent a similar amount of time making it in Vue.
So If you want high quality terrains with lots of trees and rocks reasonably quickly I'd go with Vue. But if you don't have the money to spend you can probably do most things in max. You might have to put a bit of extra effort in though.

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That looks pretty "Vue" like in style. nice job. It seems funny to me to be discussing whether or not you CAN do landscapes in max seeing as its the professional extremely expensive 3d software and vue is kindof an entry level thing. but admittedly its going to be more work starting from scratch and building convincing procedural materials can be tricky, but the only real obstacle is the vast amount of trees needed for this type of effect and its a constant battle against your RAM in max, using vray proxy would bring things into a bit more of an even playing field. This sounds like a worthy challenge.

build a convincing landscape with foliage using max?? You already have an entry though i guess

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if you were doing this professionally would you not make the background a highly detailed matte painting?

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Yeh, unless it was a flythrough.

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Yeah, it would depend on what was going happen with the camera aswell as what type of animation was in the shot. eg. if there were planes or a dragon casting shadows on the landscape you would need the geometry. plus you could well be using a basic 3d render like this one as the basis for the matte painting so that all your perspective lined up perfectly.

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I think if we were to make a full blown challenge out of it I'd like to spend a bit more time on it. Sounds like an idea though.

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only problem with the challenge is it kind of excludes anyone who is not a 3d artist

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Yeah I guess so. but then again are there any people here who are purely 2d artists? it would be hard to judge works side by side if one was purely illustration and the other 3d. mixed media is appropriate due to the fact that we always use compositing and photoshop post work but to have illustrations and 3d renderings judged side by side seems a bit unusual. certainly harder to judge with equality. the disciplines are just so different they deserve to be judged on there own merits. Maybe we should keep this unofficial. I might try and make some sort of quick landscape just to test how many trees I can get max to render without crashing

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I might unofficially have another crack then.

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