e-on Vue 6 Infinite review

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.

Author: Tom Arah