Real World Computing

Esprit also offers greatly enhanced materials handling with another 200 or so presets added, along with an advanced editor dialog that lets you create new materials based on procedural functions. More powerful still are Esprit's new EcoSystem-based materials, layers built from hundreds, thousands, even millions of individual 3D objects such as Vue's own rocks and plants. Like other Vue materials, these can vary depending on altitude, orientation and substrate, which means you can instantly layer a realistic 3D forest onto a mountain, with the species and density of the trees changing the higher up you go...

This is amazing to watch at work, but if you try to fine-tune an EcoSystem you'll soon discover that it's pretty much a case of "take what you're given". However, e-on also offers a dedicated EcoSystem add-on that provides full customisation, letting you create your own materials from imported objects and even animations. That's just the first of five add-ons available for Esprit: DeepAccess offers greater scene control by supporting unlimited layers; LightTune adds advanced lighting controls such as soft shadow mapping; Botanica lets you edit existing plants and create new species; and HyperVue lets you join up to five networked PCs into a render farm for animations or even complex still images.

Such extensibility is a massive strength for Vue 6 Esprit, especially as these modules are relatively inexpensive, with the EcoSystem module at $99 and the others at $39 each. However, if you buy more than one or two, the price soon mounts up, so e-on offers Vue 6 Studio Pro, which includes all for $399.

You might think that with all these add-on features built in, Studio Pro would be top of the Vue range, but it isn't by a long way - for professionals, e-on now offers maximum creative power via Vue 6 Infinite at $695. This, again, enhances all the core features, starting with important user interface advances such as reorganisable and resizable view panes, a dockable timeline, a full-screen mode and multiple levels of undo/redo. Materials handling has also been overhauled, with support for graph-based control of functions, advanced inputs such as screen position and angle of incidence, texture baking and video-based rotoscoping. Animation is transformed by the new ability to graphically control parameters, while support for motion blur and flicker reduction enable much smoother and more realistic output. This is particularly useful with Infinite's SolidGrowth4 plants, which automatically sway in the default soft breeze and react naturalistically to ventilator-based winds. Rendering is also improved by supporting multiple processors (great for quad-core systems) and multiple passes (in which elements such as lighting, shadows and depth are rendered separately); the restriction to 1,600-pixel-wide animations is also lifted.

However, Vue Infinite's real killer feature again lies in its EcoSystem handling, where e-on has added second-generation technology that lets you create interrelated layering effects. More significantly, you can take hands-on control by interactively painting EcoSystems onto your terrains, with the power to control size, colour and density, to add or remove individual elements, and even to convert an instance to an ordinary object for editing, then replace it into its underlying material.

Vue 6 Infinite's other main strength is that it's designed to integrate with other apps as part of larger workflows, apparent through its enhanced import options with support for VRML, SketchUp's architectural SKP files and motion-tracking information. It's Vue Infinite's export capabilities, though, that stand out: multipass renders can be output to multilayered PSD files for post-processing in Photoshop, for example, or to RLA, RPF or EPX format for depth-based compositing in After Effects or Piranesi. Most importantly, Vue Infinite lets you export the objects that make up your scenes, including terrains and vegetation, to a wide range of popular 3D formats: 3DS, C4D, COB, DXF, LWO and OBJ. You can even export the scene as a whole to 3DS and LWS.

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