e-on Vue 4 Professional

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.

Author: Tom Arah