Powerful 3D landscape design and rendering software...

for more information on this award, see HERE

This is a sample Vue scene showing a foggy farm in a snow-covered landscape at dusk

To describe Vue 5 Infinite is as a ‘landscape generator’ would be to do it an injustice. The company which developed it, e-on Software, claims that it is “the most efficient and advanced solution for creating, animating and rendering natural 3D environments.” But that’s just part of the story. The thing that makes Vue 5 Infinite special is that it enables you to create pictures of remarkable beauty with remarkable ease. In short, this is the simplest way to create the most beautiful landscapes you’ll never (in real life) see.

I first came across Vue d’Esprit (as it was then called) way back in 1998. At the time, it seemed like a slightly underpowered alternative to Bryce. As time has passed, however, Vue has increased dramatically in power and sophistication. The latest version is a very serious tool indeed, capable of building and rendering landscapes of great complexity; it can even populate scenes with huge forests of endlessly varying trees. As an added bonus, it has some modelling and animation tools built in and it supports import and export to and from other applications (ranging from Poser to Lightwave).

Easy Does It

One of the great things about Vue is that it is extremely easy to use. Just pick an atmosphere, drop on a terrain or two, click an icon to add an ocean and you’re all set to render your virtual location. Of course, to take full control over landscape creation, you may need to go through a number of other steps too - selecting different material for mountains and oceans, adding objects such as trees and boulders and so on. Most of this can be done quite simply by picking objects and materials from toolbars and dialog boxes. As a consequence, even novice users will be able to design quite detailed and atmospheric landscapes simply by pointing and clicking.

Here Vue displays the scene in four panes.
The animation preview is shown as a sequence of frames along the bottom with the timeline shown above it.

In common with most established general-purpose 3D modelling and animation programs, Vue uses a traditional four-pane user interface for displaying scenes from top, side, bottom and camera (perspective) points of view. Optionally, any one of these views can be expanded to occupy the entire screen.

A Landscape In Four Steps... You can create landscapes in a matter of moments with Vue. Here is an example of how to create a scene in four easy stages … First: Start the program and pick an atmosphere, complete with sunlight and clouds, from a ready-to-use selection. Click icons on the left of the workspace to drop in a couple of mountainous terrains and a water plane for the sea Optionally, apply materials to the terrains and sea. Here I am turning the terrains into rocky mountains with thawing snow-caps Render the scene to see all the effects such as cloud cover, reflections on wavy water and ‘camera lens flares’ You can also change the resulting picture without changing the landscape itself… Here are the same terrains in the same water plane - all I’ve done is changed the camera angle, the atmosphere and the materials. But the resulting picture is dramatically different. Click HERE for a larger view of this picture (in a popup window)

Most objects are added to a scene by clicking an icon or making a selection from a dialog. To add a terrain, for example, you click a small ‘mountain’ icon and a rectangular area with a randomised geography (peaks and troughs of varying heights) is instantly placed into the scene. If you don’t like the default appearance, you can double-click the terrain to load it into an editor. Here you can click buttons to apply varying types of erosion to the landscape and you can dig or raise valleys and hills by using your mouse to ‘paint’ elevations onto the terrain. A number of effects such as grit, pebbles, cracks and ‘fir trees’ can also be applied to texture the landscape in various ways.

While the ‘fir tree’ effect can be used to create a pin-cushion surface on a terrain in order to simulate distant forestation, this is not convincing when viewed at close quarters. In fact, Vue provides an excellent range of highly detailed plant models which can be placed into the foreground and middle distance. More than fifty ‘species’ of plant are provided as standard, ranging from patches of grass to ferns, maple trees and palms. There are even some weird and wonderful ‘alien’ plants.

Each time you add a plant to your scene, Vue automatically randomises its properties - its shape, sizes, number of branches and so on - so that a forest made up of a single species has real variety rather than looking like an army of unvarying clones.

If you want even more control over the appearance of vegetation, you can alter the plants further using a dedicated editor. Here you can drag sliders to change the length, width and curl of the leaves and the gnarliness, angle and diameter of the trunk. You can change the colours of the leaves and branches or you can load up (or define) new materials using the material editor. Bitmaps can be used to apply shaped and coloured leaves to a tree.

A remarkable new feature of Vue 5 Infinite lets you create entire forests of tens, hundreds or thousands of trees and plants simply by applying a special material, called an EcoSystem, to a terrain (or to a Water plane if you are working underwater!).  It is claimed that literally millions of plants, rocks and other objects, including imported models, can be distributed throughout a scene using EcoSystem technology. Instead of creating each object independently, instances (‘virtual copies’) of an object are created - which, e-on Software says, explains how complex EcoSystems can be created and rendered reasonably speedily and without exhausting system resources.

EcoSystems You can either apply pre-defined EcoSystems, or you can create your own by adding plants or other objects to an EcoSystem material. Here I am picking a standard EcoSystem material containing grass, trees and rocks... . ...I apply the material to a terrain and this is the result - an instant grassy hill with scattered rocks and trees. Here I am creating a new EcoSystem containing a mix of three different types of palm tree... This entire island has been filled with palms simply by applying my EcoSystem material to the terrain!

The hierarchy panel shows the individual objects in the Metablob

Vue 5 Infinite has a small but useful range of built-in modelling tools. There are ready-to-use primitives such as spheres, cubes and pyramids from which new shapes can be created using Boolean joins, unions and intersections. These Boolean operations are reversible since all objects in Vue are arranged in a hierarchical tree shown in a docked panel. The objects forming a Boolean object are grouped on a sub branch and can be ungrouped subsequently. Objects can also be turned into ‘metablobs’ - smoothly shaped objects which blend together (in form and material) when they are in close proximity. Once again, metablobs are grouped in the hierarchy and can be ungrouped later - or indeed, the original primitives may have the metablob properties removed from them. Vue also has a text tool which lets you enter text, select a font and add bevels and materials then place it right in the landscape. Very useful for creating logos!

This metablob is made from two cubes and one sphere, each of which has a different material. Note that the materials as well as the shapes blend into one another

Other special objects include randomised rocks, planets (2D ‘orbiting’ discs with a preset or user-selected bitmap ‘face’ and simulated phase alterations). There is a library of more complex objects such as buildings, furniture, ships and land vehicles; and you can load models (including, in many cases, materials and textures) created in other 3D applications. Special support is provided for Poser models which can be imported as single static models or as complete animations.

While the animation capabilities of Vue do not rival those of dedicated animation packages (it would be difficult, though not impossible, to have herds of velociraptors running through your Vue landscapes!) it does a pretty decent job. Water can be animated to simulate waves, trees can be animated to simulate wind. Skies and planets can be animated. Even materials can be animated so you can have multi-material metablobs melting into one another if you really want!

An animation wizard lets you animate your camera to walk, ride or fly through landscapes. You can make simple selections to apply motion effects to cause the camera to move over the ground like a car or bank like a plane. You can manipulate objects and parameters using the key frame timeline and you can post process animations to create effects such as motion blur.

Vue isn't restricted to rural landcsapes. This sample scene uses a variety of shapes to create a futuristic city.

There are numerous rendering options to generate the final image or animation at varying degrees of quality. For the highest quality, you can render with global lighting, radiosity and HDRI (High Density Range Image) in which the light from objects interacts to create subtle realistic effects. Some rendering options are highly processor intensive. You can save subsequent rendering time after a scene has been rendered once by ‘baking on’ the illumination in the form of texture maps when re-rendering. Professional digital artists can also take advantage of multiple processor support or rendering across a network (Windows and/or Mac).

There are many other features of Vue 5 Infinite that add to its power - for example, it has a capable material editor and a good atmosphere editor which lets you alter the position of the sun, set the degree of fogginess and add stars, rainbows and lens flares. It also has the Python programming language built in (albeit without a development environment) to let you program new features and automate existing ones.

Its help system, unfortunately, is merely adequate. Basic information on the user interface and editors is available from the man help menu; however, this help is poorly organised beneath headings displayed in HTML pages, making it difficult to find relevant information quickly. There is limited ‘context sensitive’ help which can be loaded from certain dialogs. Other dialogs, such as the one used to import objects, have no help. A fully cross-references context-sensitive help system would be a distinct improvement. It does, however, have a good manual of about 580 pages, including some useful tutorials and a reference to the Python language.

Vue From The Top

In summary, Vue 5 Infinite manages to achieve a rare combination: not only is it one of the most powerful programs of its type but it is also admirably easy to use. Even a complete beginner will be able to create stunning scenes after just one or two attempts. For more advanced artists, the good terrain modelling tools, excellent vegetation and the ability to create simple Boolean and metablob models make Vue rather more than ‘just another’ landscape designer. Its ability to import and export models and landscapes and to use animated Poser models make it valuable both as a self-contained graphic tool and as part of a larger software toolset. Its animation capabilities are good and its rendering quality is superb.

In brief, Vue 5 Infinite can now be regarded as the 3D landscape application by which others are judged. All in all, tremendously impressive and a worthy winner of the Bitwise Recommended award.

Huw Collingbourne

November 2005