Using VUE for games, possible?

bern3d

Has anyone here, -that used / knows how to use- VUE to create terrains, vegetation, forests .... for games??

fade1

vue is not really good for realtime stuff, as it's strength comes from the powerful rendering. i have good experience with rendering costum skydomes and you can render some beautiful billboards/2D stuff for your scene. lately i threw some trees from xfrog in it and you get great results, hard to achive with 3d packages.
or in other words: vue makes a simple stone look great, but used with realtime shading it sucks bigtime. same goes probably for terragen.

Justin Meisse

I've only messed with getting height maps from Worldmachine into Crysis,here's a WM heightmap and color map on a default sand texture in Crysis Wars:


unfortunately I can't find the tutorial right now but it's basically just a process of exporting a heightmap in a format your engine can read.

bern3d

hmm, thanks fade1 and Justin for your replies

Lamont

I only used it for terrain erosion and exported the height data.

Will Faucher

Like mentioned before, Vue isn't good for realtime. If you are looking for a fast way to make vegetation and foliage, you're still going to have to do it the hard way. Unless you use speedtree, and even then, it's just for trees.

Blaizer

I use vue to generate skymaps

Justin Meisse

<edit> ok, found out that World Machine isn't that cheaper than Vue but it's still pretty cheap, right now it's on sale for $69, or $189 per seat if being used in production.

World Machine is pretty decent and I know a few game studios use it in production, either just for procedural erosion or for generating huge landmasses that are split up into game-zones.

Synthesizer

I've used World machine at work a fair bit (and even bought the cheaper one for home use). It's quite useful and usually doesn't take too much work to get something interesting looking out of it. Depending on where you take the heightmap/mesh, that editor might have some good placement tools for vegetation etc.

Justin Meisse

Oh yeah, I haven't messed with it yet but Grome looks interesting as well.