Vue6 xStream LW Plugin

[tcoursey]

Anyone used the new Vue6 xStream with lightwave yet? Comments? Troubles?

What are you using it for? How did it fit into your workflow?

Thanks.

[esper8]

Yes, I have. After much frustration, swearing, crashing and rebooting I finally managed to get xStream to work inside Lightwave and it`s painfully slow, E-on have seriously, seriously, borked this one up! A shame after all the promise that the pre-release versions showed, there is supposed to be a bug fix/update soon though

[KSTAR]

So far so good for me it has worked flawlessy with no crashes. I haven't pushed it really hard but I plan on doing so this weekend. I will give an update then, but so far its been great

[Animapper]

I've had it since it was first released. Because it works as a stand-alone product as well as a plugin, I haven't tried the plugin yet. I've had good success with it otherwise. The renderer is definitely slower than LW. I'll be testing more next week and will report back too.

Regards,

[Intuition]

I've had vue6 xstream since Monday March 5th.

I pretty much installed vue6 then installed the pugins inside Lighwave and got it to work on the first try. Its really easy to learn and the camera matching is really nice. I can see all the items from vue6 inside Layout.

It all works rather well but I'd say that using Vue6 to Light a scene with radiosity, even in 9.2, is a little slower then I would like.

Also the camera keyframing, when done in Lightwave seems to be a bit more bouncey then usual when used with Vue6. I usually set up a 3 keyframe camera move and can set up the spline curves and tension settings for a flawless camera move but vue6 seems to make the camera snap around.

I have only used it for 4-5 days though so it may be due to some unknown setting in vue6. Besides the camera keyframing bumpiness and the slow GI lighting it all works alot better then I though it would.

Building mountains, trees, clouds and skies is a breeze and they render fast without GI. I am using an dual opteron285 stsem (4cores) and it keeps the scenes responsive without any openGL slowdown or anything.

[stevecullum]

I've been using vue 6 xstream since beta release. Its pretty stable inside lightwave, but I found rendering scenes in lightwave far slower than inside vue's own renderer:(

Intuition: I'm wondering what AA settings you have setup? - (this was a significant factor in my poor render times.)

[Intuition]

Hey Steve,
The frame time slowdows are mostly due to the GI/Radiosity as any non-GI scenes render pretty fast.

[esper8]

I'm glad that you guys have got xStream working with LW. I`ve had nothing but grief with it, I can't get it to load without having to set it to work in wireframe mode which for some reason slows it down to a crawl but it`s the only mode that I can get it to work in, if try any other settings the plugin won`t load and LW hangs and crashes :(

[KSTAR]

Whoa something is definetly going wrong have you contacted e-on? I haven't seen or heard of any problems like that going on.

Im curious In the Xstream settings option what is everyone setting their global scale ratio to?

[tonybliss]

10

[stevecullum]

The frame time slowdows are mostly due to the GI/Radiosity as any non-GI scenes render pretty fast.

I'll have to re-check that I didnt have that on when I last tested it - I think spectral skies might also be slowing things down for me too. I think in general though, Vue 6 is a big improvement to Vue 5 and a welcome addition to my toolset. :)

[KSTAR]

10

I think I recall on another forum 10 also being the setting used. Is there a basis for this? Becuase it defaults to 2

[kopperdrake]

I'm glad that you guys have got xStream working with LW. I`ve had nothing but grief with it, I can't get it to load without having to set it to work in wireframe mode which for some reason slows it down to a crawl but it`s the only mode that I can get it to work in, if try any other settings the plugin won`t load and LW hangs and crashes :(

Have you set the display to use hardware open GL? By default it's set to software open GL (I found this one out a couple of days ago... :) ).

[esper8]

Yes I have, xStream works fine when I use it as a standalone, it`s just a PITA trying to get it to work in LightWave

[kopperdrake]

Ah - I've yet to use the final release of XStream as a LW plugin as I had so much trouble with the beta integrating that I moved the geometry completely over to Vue once built for the current project.