Vue 11 Infinite is the latest release of e-on software’s beautiful landscape design application. The core features of this program were established several versions ago and the last few releases might be said to have concentrated on adding refinements to give digital artists more control over their designs and the ability to create still or animated images with even more ‘photo-realism’ than hitherto.
Vue 11 on Windows – the software comes with a library of ready-to-use objects and plants. Here I am adding a tree by selecting it from the dialog box
The last principal versions, Vue 10 and 10.5, provided tools to assist in the creation of more naturally diverse terrains with a greater variety in the form and texturing of rocks or pebbles, a ‘physical water generator’ with improved simulation of light absorption and scattering, and new fractal landscaping tools for creating effects such as rock-stratification unified with the deformations of the terrain (see my review of Vue 10.5 for more information).
Vue 11 on Mac – a single licence entitles you to install a copy of the software on both a Windows and a Mac system if you wish
Vue 11 continues this process of refinement. There aren’t many big new ‘gee whiz’ features. But there are lots of subtle changes, improvements and additions to existing features. There are also some performance improvements. For example, EcoSystems (that is, repeated groups of objects such as trees and plants including automatic ‘natural’ variations) can be more rapidly populated than before, and re-rendering with indirect lighting is faster due to a new ‘illumination caching’ feature that can intelligently re-use existing lighting information. Other improvements have been made to Vue’s EcoSystems such as the ability to generate populations of plants and other objects in all directions on a plane and on complex geometries. See a summary of the new features on the e-on software web site.
To add rain of snlow to a scene you just make selections in the Atmosphere Editor – this operation is pretty simple. Not all Vue’s options are this easy to handle!
But probably the most striking addition to this release is a new particle system, ‘EcoParticles’. This can be used to generate natural-looking rain and snow (or any other type of particle ‘swarm’ such as insects, leaves and smoke). Particle effects for rain and snow are created in the Atmosphere Editor. For other types of particle they are set in the Materials Editor. Using the Vue Atmosphere Editor you can ‘populate’ a scene with weather effects and set parameters to make fine adjustments to the speed of precipitation, the amount of turbulence and even the size of snowflakes! e-on software claims that the particle effects are all physically accurate (unfortunately I didn’t have a convenient climate physicist available to verify this – all I can say is that, to my non-scientific eye, they look pretty good). Accordingly, particles interact in ways that respect their virtual mass, velocity, elasticity and so on. This video shows a short demo of particle interaction:
As in previous releases, Vue has a clean, well-designed environment with a four-window layout (top, side, front and Camera). The windows can be resized and the rendering detail (box, wireframe, smooth shaded etc.) can be changed for selected windows. You can also instantly toggle a selected window to occupy the full screen. There are dialogs and pop-out buttons bars to select atmospheres and objects such as trees, rocks and text. There is an animation wizard to help you fly or drive through your scenes on simulated aircraft and automobiles. And you can import and export terrains and objects to and from a number of well-known modelling and animation programs such as 3D Studio, Lightwave, Cinema 4D and AutoCAD (see here for more on Import/Export).
If you are new to Vue, you should be able to get started fairly rapidly by using its ‘ready-to-use’ terrains, atmospheres and objects. To take full control over your terrains, images and animations, however, you will undoubtedly need to put in a fair amount of effort. No matter how user friendly the software may seem, lurking just beneath the surface there is a huge amount of complexity. Editing objects and materials to produce truly stunning effects requires fine-level adjustment of a frightening array of parameters: altitude constraints of terrains, TAA boosts and refraction indexes X, Y, Z scales of materials – not to mention user-defined functions. If you are a programmer you can even automate tasks using the Python language.
The software comes with a very detailed PDF reference manual. However, the standard documentation lacks fully worked tutorials. The software’s features would be much more accessible to new users if there graded, step-by-step lessons were supplied. There are some online tutorials but these have not been updated to include new features such as EcoParticles. There are some good 3rd party tutorials on the GeekAtPlay site, however, including an introduction to the new particle system. e-on software has also posted a rather basic video introduction to rain effects on YouTube.
The video above shows an example of snow EcoParticle effects in Vue 11
In short, Vue 11 Infinite a professional-grade product that is used to some of the biggest studios in the CG business. This product showreel includes examples from some films and commercials:
If you need all that power, it will be worth your time and effort to master the software. If, on the other hand, your requirements are more modest, eon-Software also produces smaller and simpler landscape designers such as Vue 11 Frontier at $99 and Vue Science Fiction at $49.95. There is even a completely free edition, Vue Pioneer, for hobbyists.
In short, this is a lovely program. And, given the range of editions available, there really is something for just about everyone.
Requirements:
Macintosh Mac OS X v10.5+ 32/64,
2GHz Intel processor or faster,
1GB of free RAM,
200 MB of free Hard Disk space,
1200x768 in 65K colors/16 bits (24+ bits recommended).
Windows Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 32/64,
2GHz Pentium IV or better processor,
1GB of free RAM,
200 MB of free Hard Disk space,
1200x768 in 65K colors/16 bits (24+ bits recommended).
Recommended System Specs
Windows 64 bit (XP, Vista or Windows 7), Mac OS X v10.6
Multi-core CPU (Intel QuadCore, Core I7, or Mac Pro),
4GB+ of RAM,
4GB+ of free Hard Disk space (on the drive hosting the OS),
An OpenGL accelerated video board (see below for optimal compatibility)
Licence: A single licence can be installed on both a Mac or on Windows for the same price (and with the same installer). However, the EULA states that one licence can be used at a given time only once. So for instance if you have a Mac laptop but a Windows workstation, you can install your single licence on both but use it only on one machine at a time.
Add
to del.icio.us