Product Reviews

Professional 3D modelling apps are great for producing 3D objects and even realistic characters, but producing realistic landscapes in which to set them is another matter entirely. That's where dedicated 3D world builders such as Vue come in. The previous release, Vue d'Esprit 4, won a Recommended award for its excellent combination of power, ease of use and value. Now e-on is trying to reposition the program as the professional's choice and with a price hike to match. So what's involved and is it worth it?

What set Vue d'Esprit 4 apart was the way it made its power so accessible. This was made possible by features such as its simple viewport layout with customisable OpenGL-based previews, the always-on mini scene preview and excellent layer-based handling of objects. Vue 4 Professional sees all these features tweaked to make the program even more productive. Your system's OpenGL compatibility is now tested on start-up (don't worry if it fails, as Vue's built-in previewing is no slouch), and you can maximise and resize your viewports and individually set their pan and zoom settings. The previous limit of eight layers is now lifted and you can choose to organise your objects by name, type and size.

Vue 4 Pro also adds new modelling power. Realistic terrain creation is an essential strength for a landscape generator, and the software now supports pressure-sensitive, real-time editing. Just as important is the handling of realistic vegetation. Vue 4 Pro provides 31 preset plant species, ranging from grass and seaweed through to maple trees and coconut palms. It also provides an individual Plant Editor that lets you control everything from the level of gnarl and droop of the trunk through to the colour and curl of the leaves. Even better, if you make major changes, you can save your plant as a new species. Also new is the way that vegetation now reacts to wind. The implementation of this is typically efficient: simply drag the control arrow to interactively set direction and strength while a new tab in the Atmosphere Editor provides fine control over features such as breeze pulsation and turbulence.

So far so good, but you might have hoped for features like these in a Vue d'Esprit 5, so what justifies the leap to Vue 'Pro' and the corresponding price rise? The answer is integration. Vue 4 Pro has been completely redesigned to work hand-in-hand with other high-end applications. To begin with, this means you can now export any native object, including plants, to 3DS, OBJ, LWO, C4D, COB and DXF formats. Even more impressive is the ability to export entire scenes

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. A single realistic tree or terrain can be made up of hundreds of thousands of polygons and whole scenes can easily involve millions. No 3D modeller is happy handling such vast amounts of data, which is why landscape generators came into being in the first place. Vue 4 Pro provides an ingenious solution with its ability to lower the resolution of the output mesh to make things more manageable, but inevitably this lowers quality. The same is true of the need to convert procedural materials to texture maps, while advanced features such as water-based reflections and volumetric clouds get lost entirely.

Rather than exporting your landscapes, it's often better to import your models. Vue 4 Pro supports all the most common 3D standards and throws in Poser PZ3 support for good measure. Unfortunately, dealing with external objects cuts down on Vue's efficiency, but again e-on has come up with practical workarounds. In particular, you can now choose to 'decimate' your models. This cuts down on their complexity while you work on your scene. You can then use the new Replace By commands to reload the full model just before rendering.

When it comes to rendering, quality is crucial if Vue is to live up to its professional aspirations, and with new features such as improved control over anti-aliasing, super-sampling, motion blur and lights, its ray-traced results are even more realistic - and beautiful - than ever. Within a professional environment, productivity is just as important and rendering speed can be seriously boosted by switching to effective simulations of ray-traced shadows, reflections, motion blur and depth of field.

Rendering remains a time-consuming process, even with these tweaks, which is why Vue 4 Pro's multiprocessor support is so valuable. Even better is the new HyperVue system that lets you share the rendering burden across your network. Five render nodes are included ready-to-go, and further low-cost expansion kits are available. And, again, e-on has taken the opportunity to boost integration with other high-end applications. You can now include industry-standard G-Buffer information, such as Z Depth and Material ID layers, in your renders; these can then be exported to RLA or RPF file formats for advanced compositing in applications such as Combustion and After Effects. And Vue 4 Pro also provides plug-ins to work with recent versions of 3ds max, Cinema 4D XL, LightWave, Maya and SOFTIMAGE|XSI to enable camera and light-based animations to be synchronised ready for later compositing.

Where integration with larger workflows isn't important, Vue d'Esprit 4 remains a more attractive proposition, while the target professional market will want to wait until a service patch irons out the bugs. That said, this is another impressive release, as Vue 4 Pro moves to bridge the gap between 3D model and 3D world.