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The Vue line of products has long been considered the
premiere tool for creating incredibly realistic 3D
enviroments. E-on Software, the creator of Vue, recognizes
that there is a wide range of consumers attracted to this
product, and they've released a comparably wide-range of Vue
editions. These editions range from the
Pioneer edition (which, as hard as it is to believe, is
entirely free) to the ultra high-end
xStream edition priced at approximately $1,500. However,
considering the kind of capablilities this product delivers,
even if your needs require the most expensive edition, you'll
be entirely amazed at what you get for your money.
Note: Screenshots in this
review represent the interface in Vue 8 Inifinite.
New in Vue 8
One of the areas where Vue significantly improved in
version 8 is the terrain editor. Brush modes are now broken
into 3D and 2D modes, and the new brushes make it quite
intuitive to mold your terrain exactly as you wish. You can
create features such as caves, rock overhangs, interesting
outcroppings and much more. When working with the Terrain
Editor in Vue 8, I definitely felt as though I was working in
an advanced modeling tool instead of a scaled-down editor.
Note: E-on recently announced
Vue 8.5 which adds some great new features to terrain editing.
One cool feature in the new Terrain Editor (and there are
many) is the ability to define zones in your terrain.
Suppose you're editing a large terrain or an infinite terrain
and you want to add detail to an area close to your main
camera. By separating a small portion of your terrain into its
own zone, you can easily add detail as needed to only that
area. You can define as many zones as you want, and you can
even nest zones if required.
Vue 8 allows you to edit your terrain while viewing it in
the entire scene. This may seems trivial at first glance, but
as you work with it, you'll quickly realize how wonderful this
capability really is. By viewing your edits within the context
of other scene elements, you can achieve exactly the effect a
scene needs without having to exit and re-enter the Terrain
Editor. This feature is made even better by Vue 8's ability to
sculpt the features of your terrain in context with the scene.
In other words, you can use the Terrain Editor to add
landscape reliefs to objects in a scene (the example that E-on
uses for this feature), but you can also achieve stunningly
realistic terrain reliefs in many other scenarios as well.
Also new in Vue 8 are new displacement features that add
powerful and flexible capabilities to material editing. Bump
channels and displacement channels are now separate, and you
can add displacement in any direction. (Magnitude in each
direction can be controlled as well.) During our review, we
were able to obtain remarkable results with terrains using Vue
8's displacement features and
QuadSpinner's tutorials on
creating HyperTerrains, a concept developed by Dax Pandhi of
QuadSpinner.
Incidentally, Pandhi has spent years using Vue, and his
tutorial videos give you direct access to his remarkable
insight into this product. If you're going to get the most out
of Vue, we highly recommend that you check out QuadSpinner's
tutorials. Quite simply, there are many aspects to developing
realistic scenes that you cannot acquire by intuition. Some
techniques require teaching, and Pandhi's approach is
pleasant, interesting, and enlightening.
E-on has also improved Vue in the area of clouds and
atmospheres with Spectral 3 technology. Spectral 3 is a
technology that dramatically improves the interaction of light
with water vapor found in atmospheres and clouds. The result
is improved light quality and cloud structures. The result is
evident in the render below of a sample scene created by Dax
Pandhi.
Spectral 3 atmospheric features don't consist of user
interface elements. In other words, if you've created a scene
in a previous version of Vue, all you need to do to take
advantage of Spectral 3 atmospheres is open the file in Vue 8
and render it.
Vue 8 also adds the ability to view EcoSystems directly within
the preview windows while working with your scene, provided
your graphics card supports the new OpenGL 2.1 shader in Vue
8. You'll need a high end card to support this functionality,
but that's not surprising in this category of software
applications. It should be noted that Vue 8 offers a few
OpenGL options, and even with boards that don't support the
enhanced shader, user should be able to find an OpenGL option
that provides good performance.
Vue 8 also adds some impressive features in the area of
planetary rendering. Infinite procedural terrains provide a
real-world environment unmatched in previous versions, and by
using the planetary terrain type, rendering entire planets is
made easy. You can even have Vue render real-world cloud
density maps directly onto your planet surface.
Edition Comparison - Complete versus Infinite
As mentioned previous, there is a wide array of Vue 8
versions, and one is sure to suit your needs and your budget.
We reviewed both the Complete version and the Infinite
version, and the differences between the two aren't as major
as you might first imagine. (For a full list of differences
between Vue 8 Complete and Vue 8 Infinite editions, see the
E-on product comparison page.)
The differences between editions all seem legitimate and fit
in perfectly with the target audience of each edition.
However, one difference that we found peculiar was the ability
to customize interface colors. Only Infinite and xStream (the
two professional-level offerings) provided that ability. We'd
love to see E-on incorporate this functionality into lower
level editions.
Conclusion
Vue 8 adds significant functionality to an already mature
application. If you download the free Vue 8.4 update, you'll
find a large number of new features included with it as well,
and if you have purchased E-on's maintenance plan for Vue,
you'll also be able to upgrade to the newly released Vue 8.5
at no charge.
Vue 8 is a powerful and capable application for anyone who
needs to create realistic computer-generated environments, and
we highly recommend it.
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