1. Vue 6 Infinite Download
2. Vue 6 Infinite
3. Vue 6 Infinite Download
4. Vue 6 Infinite

1. A mini-tour on the endless possibilities using Vue 6 Infinite.
2. The first version of Vue 6 first became available early October 2006. XStream is the most advanced product in the Vue 6 suite which also contains Vue 6 Easel, Vue 6 Esprit, and Vue 6 Infinite. There is also a PLE (Personal Learning Edition) version that is free to use, but all output has watermarked results.

This is my third review of E-on Software’s Vue 5 Infinite landscape-generation software, and it’s the review I’ve been looking forward to writing (click here). It’s a coming-of-age story about a promising hobbyist’s program that emerges as a serious tool for professionals. Vue 5 Infinite achieves this professional status by bundling the previously available Mover 5 module with four other modules and adding many new features. (Editor’s Note: A pre-release version of Vue 6 Infinite is now available for download from e-onsoftware.com starting at $645.)

Vue 6 Infinite by e-on software. This site is not affiliated with e-on software in any way. All trademarks, registered trademarks, product names and company names or logos mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

E-on Software”s Vue 5 Infinite landscape-generation
software allows artists to create and render complex landscapes more quickly and easily than ever before. Image by Eran Dinur

Download game railroad train simulator gratis. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) went on record that it was using Vue as an aid to digital matte painters (for which this product is ideal), a validation of my recommendation over several years that this was the most accessible and well-balanced of the several landscape-generation programs on the market. I will qualify that statement by emphasizing accessibility, because Vue is very much an asset-driven product with only modest modeling capabilities (recently added).

Vue creates landscapes from libraries of existing atmospheres, vegetation, rocks, terrains, bodies of water, and lighting conditions. Artists have almost as much control over all of these elements as they would have had they made the objects from scratch. It’s also possible to import hand-modeled trees, rocks, and terrains, as well as texture maps and photographic backgrounds. These techniques can be added to the basic workflow, but Vue’s main strength lies in its ability to create square miles of woods or tree-covered mountains far more quickly than in other 3D programs.

This is all made possible within a straightforward and intuitive interface that provides high-level features typically beyond the reach of non-technical artists. It is clear, though, that E-on aimed to create a product that would be of interest to the visual effects market. The only caveat is that landscape generation requires a lot of processing power for rendering. This is a modest issue for illustration, but not for animation, which requires hundreds of frames. It’s hard to imagine taking on a visual effects project with Vue without a rendering farm of at least 10 processors, even at NTSC or PAL resolution — more for film work.

Interface overview

The main window presents most of the tools you will need for basic landscape creation and manipulation. There are dropdown menus and icon-driven tools with flyout options, and there are task-based windows such as the libraries for vegetation, atmospheres, and textures. Every category of the creation process is represented in the main window with an icon button. Vue aims to have you working on the big picture, meaning the composition for a camera, rather than being endlessly involved in the components of the picture such as creating plants and land masses — although the editing and creation capability is all there. Vue does not lock you into pre-ordained decisions. This includes the addition of Python scripting in the latest version.

The main creation window is deployed in the familiar quad divisions for camera, front, side, and top views. You can resize the windows and navigate within them or make any of them full-screen. The quad view is in the middle of the screen, with tools on the top and sides. Icons across the top are New File, Cut/Copy/Paste, Duplicate/Scatter Objects, Do and Undo, Load Atmosphere and Atmosphere Editor, Material List, Zoom and View tools, Timeline, and Render options (Stills and Animation). On the left side of the quad views is a strip of object-creation tools: Vegetation, Textures, Atmospheres, Terrains, Primitives, and Rocks. Continuing down, there are tools for creating Metablobs and Boolean operations; below this is a strip of navigation tools and buttons to create lights. At the very bottom are buttons for object selection and alignment.

Vue 6 Infinite Download

On the right side of the screen are the Object Properties panels, the Camera Contol Center, and the World Browser. The World Browser is organized according to layer — a customary way of handling big data sets. The layers and objects in the scene are drag-and-drop, and objects and textures can be applied this way or by clicking in various asset libraries.

The bottom of the screen space is clear until you add an animation timeline, although this can be moved to anywhere on the screen. The various icon buttons and palettes are part of the permanent interface that surrounds the view space and cannot be moved. However, you can make a preview full screen, which then hides all the tools.

The main camera parameters include focal (focal length), camera blur (depth of field), and exposure (f/stop); however, these settings are not based on industry-standard formats, but are available for artistic manipulation. In other words, there is no film-back calculation being taken into account or the relationship between depth of field and any given f/stop. This is one of the few minor limitations of the program for anyone doing visual effects work and matching to a backplate. Still, you can export a scene file to Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, or NewTek LightWave to take advantage of an accurately modeled and calibrated camera.

Workflow

Vue 5 Infinite is very similar to most 3D applications insofar as objects are imported into a virtual scene space. However, Vue provides many of the objects from libraries, and the individual elements — such as terrains, vegetation, and atmospheres — are created to work together. It’s extremely easy to set up a desert, mountain, and foothills, or an island surrounded by water, and then populate the terrain with plants and vegetation. Once a basic scene is created, different atmospheres can be previewed very quickly — including time of day, cloud types, and atmospheric haze. Adjusting a terrain is also easy to do. As your composition becomes more specific, you can lower a mountain, push back a shoreline, and generally contour the ground plane to your liking.

Similarly, the vegetation can be deployed easily, and the density of forests, grasses, and plants is controlled numerically by parameter using the EcoSystem tool. EcoSystem doesn’t just work with vegetation. It can also be used to automatically populate a highway with car models or a neighborhood with houses. While Vue parametrically varies plants from the library so that each plant is unique, this is not the case with cars or other imported objects. In this case, variation is confined to alignment, scale, position, rotation, and other placement parameters.

This basic workflow and library approach to scene creation has been in Vue from the beginning. In the fifth version of the software, the range of tools and capabilities is difficult to fault — there are no significant omissions in the feature set. In addition, its hobbyist roots have resulted in an ease-of-use quotient that belies the power of the new high-end features.

What’s new

The goal of the new tools appears to be elevating Vue to the professional market. This began in previous versions with the addition of the procedural surface tool. I’ll describe this older feature along with the new tools because it’s a core aspect of the program. Apart from dozens of smaller improvements and enhancements to the program, there are five main new features: EcoSystem technology, SmartGraph functions, multipass rendering, advanced lighting, and advanced OpenGL. There are also close to 100 smaller enhancements.

EcoSystem

As mentioned, this is an intelligent and powerful way to cover square miles of terrain with vegetation or imported models. You could easily create a city using EcoSystem. Among the many smart controls, population density of objects can be made sparse as they approach designated objects such as buildings or roads. You can also vary the color of objects based on any number of parameters, including elevation or slope of a mountain terrain. Ecosystems can be mixed and intelligently interact with one another, allowing artists to overcome the usual problem of wallpaper or tiled-looking environments in 3D programs when objects are duplicated or instanced. EcoSystem technology makes it remarkably easy to have enormous and realistic variation across an aerial-view vista and retain detail when coming within a few yards of a forest.

Multipass rendering

To really control an image at the professional level, you have to be able to control rendering elements when compositing. This is where visual effects houses are able to nail the believability as well as the mood and lighting of a scene. Typically, you need to have a diffuse, ambient, specular, shadow, reflection, and transparency pass. Also, it is very helpful to keep objects isolated with masks. Throw in a global illumination pass, and a good compositor can remake a shot — or save a shot.

Vue renders these and several other categories of passes simultaneously to a single Adobe Photoshop file as layers for still images or as individual numbered files for animation. Vue also saves a G-buffer for compositing programs that recognize RPF image format, thereby understanding occlusion and depth. These are very powerful and professional features in a product that costs $599.

Advanced lighting

Global illumination (GI), renderosity, image-based lighting (IBL), and high-dynamic-range images (HDRI) — that’s a pretty good survey of contemporary features that all the high-end 3D apps have added over the past five years. The first two, GI and renderosity, are indirect lighting models that have accounted for the significant improvement in realism in CGI since their general commercial introduction. They are also extremely rendering-intensive, so tricks such as “baking” textures into a scene after the initial time-consuming calculations are performed are standard techniques.

Vue 5 Infinite does all these things, and exposes quite a lot of the more esoteric parameters for savvy 3D artists, but also has a simple slider (EasyGI) that boils things down to a quality-versus-rendering-time range. Global radiosity is an optimized soft-light technique for huge scenes, something I would not have expected to be able to use in a large scene. I found EasyGI works well, but be prepared to have long rendering times. Vue also lets you apply advance lighting on an object-by-object basis, which is a huge help. Frequently, it only takes rendering the walls, floors, and ceilings in a room (rather than every object) to convey a soft-light feel, thereby greatly reducing rendering times.

That Vue can pull this off in scenes with billions of polys is very impressive. Frankly, a hobbyist with a fast machine can create a landscape that, in the late ‘90s, was a significant achievement at Digital Domain or ILM. Vue can also make very nice interiors using advanced lighting features with very respectable rendering times, although I did not do a head-to-head comparison with LightWave or Maya using the same scenes. This might be the subject of a future article.

IBL and HDRI are also techniques du jour, and they provide some of the benefits of indirect lighting without the huge rendering times. IBL uses a light map to illuminate a scene, which is very easy to calculate. You can paint the light map or, as is usually the case, use a light probe camera or chrome ball and photograph your own images. Typically, these are shot on set or on location when a backplate for a movie is being integrated with a CG element. IBL is a way to capture the subtle lighting conditions of a real location that would otherwise be difficult to match and would require GI and/or renderosity. Jina ocr converter registration key fast in windows 10. You can also buy stock light image maps for a variety of lighting conditions and locations.

If you shoot your light maps in stepped exposure across a range of at least 12 f/stops in half-stop increments, you can create an HDRI image map that allows you to post-expose your scene. In other words, you can dial up or dial down the levels in an image (if you have an HDRI image format such as OpenEXR). This would allow you to take an image rendered in Vue 5 Infinite, bring it into Adobe After Effects or Photoshop, and perform image editing akin to the Zone System of Ansel Adams and Minor White.

Advanced OpenGL

This was supported in previous version of Vue, but it now has dual-level implementation: low-quality for moving objects, and high-quality when objects are at rest. You can also choose which objects to render in OpenGL, allowing you to concentrate on what’s important.

Even more features

There are also several new separate features that are significant. For instance, infinite procedual terrains. These are parametric objects that increase in detail as the camera comes closer to the surface — infinitely. This means that a mile-high view and a view 6in. from the ground have equal detail. Combined with procedural textures, this means that the problems of bitmaps and polys go away, along with the huge memory issues or tiling problems those techniques present when creating vast landscapes.

Vue has also added a parametric mapping mode that is easy to use. The parametric material editor, which was introduced in an earlier version, is a very powerful node-based material editor that is a subject in itself. I have looked at many procedural editors that “wire” math and algorithmic operations in a branching data tree to create organic and animated textures of all kinds. E frontier Poser, Hash Animation Master, Maya, and just about every 3D app has a version of procedural textures, but Vue’s is particularly easy to use. Still, give yourself time to experiment with this feature. Vue has a fractal-based wave generator called Open Ocean, made procedurally, and it looks absolutely great. I’d like to see someone add a foam procedural to the surface and some other random “dirt” to Open Ocean. This would make Vue the leader in seascape generation.

Other noteworthy developments

Billboards (clear polygons) allow you to map images of trees or other complex objects onto them. Billboards always face the camera, thereby hiding the lack of dimension — a standard polygon-saving trick.

There are many smaller improvements, and even a few features, that I’ve had to omit, but the focus here is on professional tools. One caveat: Vue has optimized large-scene creation both in preview and rendering modes to make it accessible to artists with at least one fast machine. This is manageable for still images, but for animation, you really better have a few extra procs. Make that a lot of extra procs. Raytracing and GI take time to deal with millions — or even billions — of polygons.

Conclusion

This is a great tool for sophisticated hobbyists, and, for the first time, boutique visual effects houses. However, the animation tools are not at the level of the rest of the program. An f-curve camera editor for motion and real-world camera parameters are the only clear omissions in Vue 5 Infinite. There is a distributed rendering scheme that I have not used, but Vue supports unlimited procs. I would also like to see more plant libraries, even though the selection now is quite good. Similarly, more completed scenes with instructional materials would be useful. An Extras CD does have scenes for exploration, but these could be broken down by layers for analysis, along with some documentation of the steps taken to create a sophisticated scene in detail. This could be created in layers so that each layer added more objects in the order in which things were added throughout the creation process.

There is, however, reasonably good documentation. You will find quick-start tutorials on E-on’s website, as well as third-party tutorials such as AsileFX’s Vue 5 Infinite series — seven two-hour CD-ROMs sold separately. (For more on these tutorials, see digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/video_self_improvement_2.)

It’s easy to get amped about this product. If you want proof of its capabilities, look at the image galleries at E-on’s website. Highly recommended.

bottomline

Company: E-on Software
Beaverton, Ore., (866) 341-4366
www.e-onsoftware.com

Product: Vue 5 Infinite

Assets: For Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP, many useful tools for illustration and animation.

Vue 6 Infinite

Caveats: Long rendering times, camera lens calibration not up to pro level.

Demographic: Sophisticated hobbyists to boutique visual effects houses.

PRICE: $599

S.D. Katz is a New York-based writer/director and author of the best-selling booksShot by ShotandCinematic Motion.

To comment on this article, email theDigital Content Producereditorial staff atdcpfeedback@prismb2b.com.

Vue 6 Infinite Download

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