Product Reviews

Creating natural, real-world scenes is one of the most difficult tasks for a 3D modeller. And this is where Vue Infinite comes in with its dedicated, state-of-the-art capabilities.

Vue 6 Infinite is designed to work alongside your object modeller of choice, and when you first launch the program it asks which 3D application you're accustomed to, automatically adjusting its interface in terms of colours and shortcuts. This feeling of familiarity is further boosted by Vue 6's inclusion of the now almost ubiquitous Gizmo on-object manipulators for handling positioning, scaling and rotation. Other interface enhancements include a new Library tab in the World Browser, in which you can view objects used several times (these are now stored only once in memory), view and quick render shortcuts, easier copying, dropping and renaming of objects and numerous other tweaks. In fact, we'd prefer it if the main modelling apps worked more like Vue Infinite rather than the other way around.

The first step to creating your scene is selecting an atmosphere for it. Vue 6 Infinite now offers over 180 presets to choose from, based on four main atmospheric models. The main advantage of the new Spectral model is that it's based on the balance of air, dust and water particles making up the atmosphere, enabling greater realism. It also means you can add true 3D spectral cloud layers. You can even add and edit individual procedurally generated metaclouds.

After the sky, you need to take care of the ground. Vue 6 Infinite's resizable Terrain Editor offers eight preset terrain styles and seven erosion types including glaciation, alluvium and dissolve effects. There's also an option to blend procedural terrains with bitmaps, and you can customise your brush for interactive editing. For ground cover, Vue's new SolidGrowth 4 algorithms offer over 50 fully customisable plant species, which have been optimised to avoid flickering during breeze-based animation. You can also now add new Ventilator objects to control the effect of wind on vegetation.

To add external objects to your scene, Vue 6 Infinite offers wide-ranging support for 3D model standards such as 3DS, OBJ, LWO and DXF, and can also import architectural SKP files created with Google SketchUp. You can now also import simple EPS and AI PostScript files into the text editor and apply extrusions and bevels. Most impressive is the support for Poser PZ3 figures and animations. If you have Poser 6 or 7 on your system, you can even quickly repose and animate a placed figure to fit its surroundings.

Vue 6 Infinite also sees major improvements to material handling. Core changes include new support for 16-bit texture maps, non-refractive alpha transparency, displacement mapping and subsurface scattering to enable translucency effects. As well as mixing materials based on scene-based factors such as altitude, slope and orientation - essential for managing the distribution of snow on a mountain scene, for example - you can also now create materials with underlying layers showing through wherever the overlying layer is transparent.

Vue 6 Infinite's object and material handling are both impressive, but the way the program combines the two is extraordinary. This is done by creating - or

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more usually adapting - an EcoSystem material, which is built up of plant, rock and imported objects that are then scattered across the surface of the object to which it's applied, perfect for instantly creating a forest of hundreds of individual trees with the particular mix of species depending on altitude. Now EcoSystem materials can be layered, too, and the affinity between layers can be controlled so you can create advanced effects, such as grass being repelled from the base of trees but primroses attracted.

This material-based approach to EcoSystems is extremely powerful but also potentially limiting - you can tweak parameters and hit the Repopulate command, but you essentially have to take what you're given. Vue 6 Infinite's EcoSystem 2 removes this limitation by allowing you to paint object instances directly onto your scene and to interactively control their colour, size and density using a pressure-sensitive tablet. You can also just click to add or remove individual instances and interactively move, rotate and resize selections. You can even convert an EcoSystem instance into a real object for total control.

Once you've added all the elements to your scene, it's time to bring them to life. The easiest way to do this is with the Animation wizard, which now offers greater control over dynamic motion reaction effects. But Vue 6 Infinite's real animation power is found in its Timeline panel. This has been completely redesigned, offering a basic global time slider with automatic keyframing, expandable to show a Properties section with all animated objects and their properties; itself expandable to show F-curve details and expandable again to show a frame-based animation preview. You can also now quickly change the length of an animation, synchronise camera and lights information with major professional 3D apps and Adobe's After Effects, import motion-tracking information and get a quick idea of what your animation will look like with OpenGL-based preview rendering.

In terms of realism, much comes down to lighting, and Vue 6 Infinite has optimised its top-quality Radiosity model for both indoor and infinite scenes and boosted speed up to 400%. However, Radiosity remains the slowest model to compute by a distance, and the new Ambient Occlusion model promises near Global Illumination quality in a fraction of the time. Vue 6 Infinite also boosts local lighting options with Area Light Panels for softer effects, the ability to turn any object into a light source and greater control over soft shadows.

Advanced features such as displacement mapping, subsurface scattering and softer shadows are computationally intensive and, when dealing with complex EcoSystems and millions of polygons, render times are lengthy. However, Vue 6 Infinite does what it can with an improvement in general rendering speed of up to 130%, and new support for built-in post-processing. The program also now supports standalone rendering both locally and over the network, so you can continue working while rendering takes place in the background.

Ultimately, Vue 6 Infinite will be overkill for most users and, with its Vue 6 Easel (£57 exc VAT), Vue 6 Esprit (£127 exc VAT) and Vue 6 Studio Pro (£237 exc VAT) apps, e-on offers a full roster of cut-down solutions aimed at the consumer and semi-pro markets. It's possible, however, to download a free, unrestricted version of Vue 6 Infinite from e-on's website, provided the software is put to non-commercial use. For heavy users of 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and XSI, e-on also offers all the power of Vue 6 Infinite both as a standalone and integrated directly into their favourite modeller as Vue 6 xStream (£517).

However, for professional users looking for maximum creative power, Vue 6 Infinite is the natural choice for natural modelling.