Vue or Terradome for video environments
synthcat
Posts: 0
Hi all.
I am getting back into 3D, this time primarily focused on short animated videos. I'm looking at both Vue and Terradome (in Daz3D Studio) and having a challenging time weighing the pros and cons before plunging into either of them. Some details:
* I'm primarily planning to work with desert and urban environments, and some abstract/surreal, at least for the immediate future.
* I run macOS High Sierra.
* A lot of my characters/animations/props are in Poser, as well as some in Daz Studio.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I don't recall being able to use Vue elements very effectly in Daz Studio, so Terradome would be my suggestion since it is native to DS.
...just picked up TD 3 during the PC for a day sale wrap up. My system updating and Library reconstruction has been put on hiatus for a bit until I recover a bit more from the accident I had, but once everything up and running again going to dive in play around with it.
True, but you can easily use Daz characters in Vue, even animated characters if you export to Vue in Collada.
True, but the OP was looking for options to use "in" DS and Vue isn't one of them..
Vue -- in my opinion -- yields much better landscapes than Terradome. I've never been able to make a landscape with Terradome that looked 'realistic' (but that may be a problem with me, rather than Terradome).
In my experience, every version of Vue has always been hellaciously unstable on Mac and the latest one is no exception. You can get past that (although Vue will probably urge you to switch off some of its advanced features after the first few crashes), but you should always save your work early and often.
Which you choose will probably depend on the other content that you want to animate, and how much patience you have for tweaking. With Terradome, things are pretty straightforward: you set up your figures and animations in DAZ Studio, add a Terradome environment, and then render, all in one program. If you're using Vue, you'll need to set everything up in Studio, export it in some format that Vue accepts -- Collada is suggested above, and that's certainly what Collada is supposed to be for -- and then pull the export into Vue for rendering. This may involve you in substantial amounts of tweaking; I haven't tried Collada imports in the latest version, but in the past I've always had to fiddle with the textures of imported objects a lot in order to get things to render right. By the way, texture editing seems to be particularly crashy -- remember what I said about saving often?
If your animations don't really interact with the more distant scenery, then you might render a landscape in Vue, then use it as a backdrop for your DAZ Studio renders. This would give you sort of the best of the two worlds: the simplicity of doing all the animation and rendering in DAZ Studio, plus the higher-quality Vue landscapes as a setting. However, you need to make sure that the lighting matches up -- nothing will expose the trick faster than a landscape that's lit from one angle composited with an animation that's lit from another. You might need to play around a bit until you find a way to make the backdrop and the foreground animation merge seamlessly.