Vue vs Bryce vs Octane render: antialiasing
I unsed to complain about the quality of antialiasing in Vue compared to the one you can get in Bryce. As I wanted to see if Bryce-like quality could be obtained in Vue, I set up a similar scene in both programs and rendered it to have a fair comparison. As I have been using Octane Render lately, I have added it to the test.
The main difference
One thing is generally striking when you use reflective materials in Bryce, such as water or metal: the exquisite quality of the reflections. Even in pictures involving still water, they are generally silk smooth. On the contrary, in many Vue images, water reflections look quite crappy. This is a way you can tell an image is done is Vue.
As a result, I generally favored Bryce to make images involving reflective metals or water such as these:
The test
So I wanted to see if the Vue antialiasing was really that bad or if similar results could be obtained in both programs on that respect.
I set up the very same scene in both programs:
- Same object (exported from Bryce)
- Same camera angle
- Same IBL map used in all three
The only thing I was unable to make identical is the lighting. This difference is mainly due to the result in IBL set up.
Bryce 7.1 image
IBL render with 128 quality and superfine antialiasing.
Render time: No idea, but likely to be more than 30'.
Appreciation: the antialiasing is silky smooth, but at the price of a very long render time. The shadows around the trifoil remain patchy.
Vue image
Environment mapping render with radiosity. Crisp antialiasing with lots of subrays per pixel (min: 24, max: 48).
Render time : 3'.28" (8 cores at 4 Ghz)
Appreciation: With these high settings, the antialiasing is fine, and the shadows better than on the Bryce image. The "black hole" of the HDRI image is very apparent.
Octane Render image
IBL environment and a slight depth of field (DoF) effect. Pathtracing render with 4000 samples.
Render time: 32" (2x Geforce 1080 Ti)
Appreciation: the GPU renderer works very fast and is very good, provided it has enough samples. If not, it may appear a bit grainy.
Verdict
The faster renders of Octane make it a very practical choice for working on anything but the most complex scenes. It is less adapted for landscapes, due to the lack of an easy to use and reliable haze setup. But the Live Viewer makes it more practical as it shows you the final result very fast. In comparison, making preview renders in Vue is really not practical.
The default image quality of Vue is preview. With this setting, renders are fast, but images look very crappy; giving the beginner the impression that the general image quality is very low and making it difficult to foresee the final result.
When switching to more advanced settings (eg:superior) quality greatly improves, render times dramatically increase, but minimum object antialiasing quality is still low (set at 4 vs the 24 I used in the above scene). This can lead to scale effects in reflections. Using higher settings in complex scenes makes render times dramatically higher and still does not entirely solve the scaling problem in critical areas.
In Bryce, the default render quality is already good. Switching to superior or premium dramatically increases render times and makes the quality even higher. Bryce default settings are thus higher, giving the impression that the overall quality is also higher.
