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Vue recently upgraded their lastest version to release 6. Quite a few improvements including 10% faster render times.
It still only costs $200.00 to buy Vue Esprit which includes the import module and renderup module, so you can import Daz charactersinto your scenes.
Yes, QuadSpinner GeoGlyph 2 is an addon for World Machine, but also supports the current WM releases like 3.0.x. The current WM release is 3.0.21.
QuadSpinner hasn't done any Vue addons since a long time. GeoGylph 2 still gets maintenance updates, but QuadSpinner's new standalone application is Gaea which is still in development, but works already great and gets frequent updates.
But note that these applications (also including World Creator) primarly produce height maps, basically greyscale images used for displacement (as well as basic color, flow and alpha maps). For realistic landscapes you need another 3d application for creating nice procedural textures and that can sub poly displace and render these height maps. They can also be used in Vue or Terragen of course.
In my opinion (I have all these applications except World Creator), the best results can be achieved with World Machine + GeoGlyph height maps imported into Vue, Terragen or Cinema 4D (or similar 3D applications). This is where the often more time intensive and complex work actually begins with proper composition, texturing and lighting.
There is no DAZ integration in Vue and Terragen unfortunately. All textures would need to be modified and their render engines are not really well suited for character rendering in my opinion. DAZ import in other 3D applications via fbx or obj works much better than in these landscape applications.
The exception is Vue xStream, this allows to combine DAZ characters and Vue landscapes in a 3d host application (I use it with Cinema 4D and LightWave). However this is a quite expensive solution.
Blender is also an option. I haven't imported DAZ characters into Blender yet but displacing and rendering height maps works very well. And Blender's Cycles render engine is great for both character / skin and landscape rendering.
Another possibility (and probably most professional way) is the use of compositing applications. You could render the characters with alpha maps in DAZ and combine the output from landscape or 3d applications in the compositing application. Good results would require keying, light source alignments, camera matching / tracking / syncing.
Marander3d
I respectfully have to disagree with you regarding Daz integration into Vue. Daz characters can be imported into Vue using obj or dae(collada) files. If you import as dae you can fully re-pose them in Vue, and dae will import animations made in Daz. Daz textures work fine in Vue, and you do not need Vue Xstream to add Daz characters into Vue, I do it with Vue Esprit, the cheapest Vue application. If you have an older version of Vue Xstream and skinvue you can modify Daz character textures to almost rival Iray, including adding wet drips and drops, blood, and dirt, not counting numerous other adjustments.
V8 Delilah rendered in Vue 11 Esprit with Daz textures, No changes to anything. Saved as a collada file with generic collada setting.
Ah! Thanks for the clarification. Makes more sense now.
Bryce is the least expensive landscape generator and it is very versatile. It creates 16-bit TIFF greyscale height maps that can be exported, modified, re-imported, further modified, blended with a second hight map or drawn directly with different brushes in the editor, filtered, terraced, ...; it also imports USGS DEMs (digital elevation maps). Resolutions go from 16 (very coarse) all the way to 4096 (very detailed). Terrains can be tiled to create huge detailed landscapes. The terrain hightmap can also be exported as a mesh in different resolutions.
I stand corrected about the DAZ to Vue import, it seems there were some import improvements in the last couple of Vue 2016 point releases.
OBJ, FBX and Colada import in Vue work fine with basic textures (but without normal mapping, specular mapping, bump mapping, sub-surface scattering etc). But that's the same with other FBX imports anyway, those maps and settings need to be set manually (as well as some alpha / transparency changes).
There is still alot of texture tweaking required and I haven't reached anywhere close to the quality I would expect. The Vue sub-surface scattering and bump mapping settings don't provide good results for me (yet).
Results like the the image artd3D posted can be achieved easily but that's not the render quality I'm after.
So for now I will keep the Vue xStream workflow.
If anyone is interested, this is a standard fbx import of a DAZ character in Vue.
No subsurface-scattering, specularity, normal or bump mapping applied, only small correctures to the eye materials.
As I mentioned above, not the quality I want to render. If I find time I will try to work out better texture settings, but so far I didn't get useful results.
Skin shading works much better in other 3d applications and render engines for me and also allows better control over the mesh, subdivision settings, expression morphs, corrective pose morphs and animation.
Would be great if e-on could improve the DAZ character import / texturing for Vue.
How good is Bryce at creating shader materials for export with those USGS DEMs? Can it still export the DEMs as OBJs file even if the imported DEM was 4096 resolution?
Bryce uses procedurals for materials (shaders) though can use pictures as well, but mapping is somewhat limited. Exporting the material along with the OBJ just makes the applied material to a picture (not UV mask), the result is not very appealing in most cases.
I haven't tried hi-res DEMs, low-res a long time ago. I use Mars MOLA, GTOPO30 and Moon maps which are greyscale hight maps. As for exporting, there are Grid and Adaptive Triangulation available and up to around 20 million polygons.
Thanks