Product Reviews

It used to be Bryce, but now, if you want to create photo-real landscapes, Vue 6 from French developer e-on software is just about the only game in town. Unlike Bryce, which has remained a useful, if limited, tool, Vue Infinite has taken a place in some of Hollywood's top production houses - all the digital landscapes in Pirates of the Caribbean were created with it, for example.

Our previous grouses about the interface have been partly addressed: Vue 6 Infinite sports a much more sober interface, and the icons are a little clearer, though still too small. When you first run it, it also offers to re-map all keyboard shortcuts and interface colours to reflect the 3D application you use most: LightWave, Cinema4D or Maya.

While the look of the interface has improved, its operation is still clunky - tabbing in dialogs doesn't work the way it should, there's no Select tool, and we encountered problems using an Intuos 1 tablet; e-on is aware of the tablet issues. The new transform widgets for moving, rotating and scaling objects, however, have been made much more user friendly. These now behave more like those in Maya and modo - a good move. Similarly, the wind and (localised) ventilators sport new widgets for interactively setting speed and direction.

Atmospheres is where you begin your terraforming. Vue now supports three atmosphere models: Standard, Volumetric and the new Spectral model. The Spectral model allows for more interaction between individual atmosphere elements, such as clouds, water vapour, sunlight and the like. E-on's engineers know an awful lot about atmospheric physics - and it shows.

Like almost all aspects of Vue, a raft of pre-set atmospheres are provided. One caveat: some of the content displayed in the browsers can now only be downloaded - for a price - from Cornucopia, e-on's online repository. You do, however, get a $15 voucher to spend there.

Ecosystems are at the heart of Vue 6, giving you the incredible ability to paint landscape features directly onto terrains.

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Ecosystems II also allows the painting of objects - generally vegetation - on the fly, without having to create a dedicated Ecosystem material first. The 'paintbrush' can also read pressure information from graphics tablets, allowing parameters such as size and plant density to be controlled by feel. There are options to paint swaths of vegetation, to erase, and even to paint on scale and colour changes - although you have to re-render to see the results. Couple this with Vue's patented SolidGrowth technology, which introduces random variations to ensure that no two plants are ever identical, and you have the ability to produce some very real environments.

Vue 6 Infinite has also had some speed tweaks - it's Universal Binary and can make use of as many cores as your Mac has. Sometimes, you may think a render is proceeding slowly, until you take into account Vue's ability to handle data sets - scenes with several billion polygons - that would choke other renderers. Throw on top of that Global Illumination and radiosity, and you have a severe challenge, but one that Vue takes in its stride. We did notice the interface becoming a little unresponsive with really huge scenes, though.

For really demanding jobs there's also the RenderCow application, which lets you split rendering jobs across networked computers. Also new to the renderer are, among other features, sub-surface scattering for accurately portraying translucent materials such as jade, and sub-polygon displacement. The latter gives extreme and accurate displacements to meshes without tearing or distorting the underlying geometry. The renderer can now also output multi-layered files to Photoshop, making compositing and isolating elements much simpler.

For the ultimate control over your surfaces, Vue 6 now includes a SmartGraph procedural shader network. It can take a little time to get used to, but the power that this approach affords to realistic texture design is incomparable. It sports, for example, ready-made Skin, Cartoon, Velvet and X-Ray shader nodes. There's also a new volumetric shader, akin to HyperVoxels in LightWave.

The animation interface has also seen an overhaul, and it's getting difficult to see the join between Vue and other more 'complete' packages such as Maya and LightWave. Animation control has been bolstered with the introduction of Bézier-controlled function curves. Pre-animated meshes from Poser can also be imported with their motion intact.

There's a lot to like in this new version, not all of which can be covered here. Check out the demo reel on e-on's website - and prepare to be amazed.