Product Reviews

One of the key attractions of 3D is the promise it holds for imagining and creating your own believable worlds. In practice, however, this proves surprisingly difficult, even in the most advanced and expensive 3D-modelling apps. The solution is to turn to Vue 5 Esprit (note the rename from 'Vue d'Esprit'), which offers amazing creative power at an affordable price.

What sets Vue 5 Esprit apart is its fantastic ease of use. The interface is built on a typical four-windowed environment, but compared to the complexities of most 3D-modellers, it's a real breath of fresh air. The multithreaded OpenGL-based screen handling is amazingly fast and it's been further optimised to enable dual-quality, real-time textured previewing. Vue's simple layer system for handling its objects is just as impressive, and this approach follows through to the rest of the program, while still making it easy to drill down to power when required.

The first step is to set up the atmosphere, and Vue provides more than 160 presets from which to choose from. It also now offers three different systems - the existing Standard and Volumetric models plus a new Environment Mapping option. This lets you load bitmaps including HDRIs (high dynamic range images) to use as a background and lighting source. You can even integrate this with Vue's own customisable atmospheric features such as fog, haze and lens flares.

Even more impressive is the new support for global illumination, which recognises that in real life light doesn't only come direct from light sources but is reflected indirectly. Obviously, this seriously adds to the processing required (especially when dealing with infinite outdoor scenes) so e-on has come up with three different global illumination models - global ambience, global illumination and global radiosity - each with its own trade-off between end-quality and render time. To help keep things manageable, Vue 5 Esprit also offers a simple EasyGI slider for controlling a whole number of advanced parameters as a single setting.

After choosing and customising your atmosphere, the next job is to set up the terrain. The millions of polygons necessary to create realistic landscapes grind most modellers to a halt, but this isn't the case with Vue 5 Esprit. In fact, Vue's standard handling, based on an underlying greyscale bitmap, even lets you interactively 'paint' the terrain to raise or lower the surface, or to apply effects such as fluvial erosion or craters. The trouble with this approach is that the resolution is fixed so that if you produce large renders, or

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look at the terrain close-up, you'll see undesirable polygonal edges. Vue 5 Esprit solves the problem with its new procedural terrains, which add detail as needed in exchange for a greater rendering overhead. You can even edit these fractally based terrains with the same simple interactive editing tools.

You're now ready to add the objects that bring a scene to life. You can add infinite ground, cloud and water planes, realistic planets and individual rocks, but where Vue really impresses is with its handling of vegetation. The program comes with 50 preset species, ranging from seaweed to blossoming cherry, and they're all stunningly realistic. There's no direct editing control (for that you need Vue Professional), but each time you add a plant a unique version is generated. The Scatter and Replicate dialog has also now been tweaked to let you automatically create new variations so that, for example, you can produce a realistic forest in seconds.

Other options for adding to your scene include seven standard 3D primitives, from spheres to planes, and new text support complete with control over bevel and extrusion. This might seem strange as text isn't exactly a natural phenomenon, but it can be useful for producing animated titles and, when used with symbol fonts, it effectively opens up the range of primitives available. Sadly, these text-based primitives can't be used with Vue 5 Esprit's new Metablob modelling system, which lets you melt and merge the other primitives to produce more organic shapes.

In combination with the new option of advanced node-based material control, there's no doubt that Vue 5 Esprit's internal modelling capabilities are better than they were, but they're still of limited creative use. You're better off bringing in and positioning 2D bitmaps as alpha planes or, preferably, externally created 3D models. Thankfully, Vue 5 Esprit can import files in the standard 3DS, DXF, LWO and OBJ file formats, as well as static Poser 4 and 5 models. With the separate Mover 5 module (£75) you can also import Poser animations, and thanks to the Animation Wizard, it's easy to set up animation paths, which now include dynamic reaction to motion. Vue 5 Esprit also supports pre-animated Vue meshes, though we'll have to wait for the new Vue Professional to be able to create them.

When you're happy with your scene or animation it's time to render. The main Render Settings dialog doesn't look very different, with the biggest change being the new Superior preset. Behind the scenes though, the new rendering engine now works with full 96-bit colour for increased subtlety and better lighting dynamics. You can also now apply camera-based post-processing effects, such as gamma and colour correction, and switch between cameras during animations.

If you need the maximum level of editing power and control, and especially if you want to integrate your work with other 3D applications, then hold off for the new version of Vue 5 Professional that's due shortly. Otherwise, assuming you have a system to do it justice, Vue 5 Esprit makes it easy to produce truly beautifully naturalistic scenes and animations at a great price.