Vue 8 Infinite / xStream review

Tom Arah Read more December 23, 2009

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£897

Price when reviewed

Since it first appeared 12 years ago, the Vue platform has come to dominate the entire field of naturalistic 3D world creation. For 3D enthusiasts and artists, e-on software provides a wide range of options – most notably Vue Esprit, Studio and Complete – all building up from the foundation of the free Vue Pioneer. However, for CG professionals it’s a straight choice between the standalone Vue 8 Infinite and the add-on-based Vue 8 xStream.

Whichever level you’re working at, creating naturalistic 3D scenes is an inherently demanding task (high resolution output can involve processing billions of polygons), but Vue makes the whole process simple. Essentially it’s a case of setting up your atmosphere and terrain, managing materials to control overall appearance and then bringing your landscape to life with plants and models.

Vue 8’s first major advance in this regard is its new handling of atmospheres. The Spectral engine is Vue’s most accurate atmospheric model for mimicking the interaction between air, dust and water particles and, by radically improving the quality of its internal shadowing, the realism of clouds is now greatly enhanced – an essential element of most scenes.

The changes to terrain handling are even more significant. Here the major advance is the inclusion of new 3D sculpting tools in the Terrain Editor. Previously you were limited to interactively raising and lowering terrain altitude, but now you can sculpt, inflate and carve your terrain in all directions to produce effects such as caves and overhangs. You can even toggle the display of other scene elements so that you can interactively sculpt your terrain around objects such as trees and buildings.

Hands-on 3D sculpting works well in the context of Vue’s grid-based heightfield terrains, but becomes more complex with procedurally-generated terrains. Here, Vue 8 Infinite lets you break up your scene into zones to optimize performance and to get the best of both worlds, say adding an area of sculpted foreground detail to an infinite terrain. Even better, Vue 8’s 3D sculpting uses smart subdivision technology that adds polygons intelligently, depending on the level of detail required, so optimizing the resulting mesh density and overall performance. Zoom out and you’re sculpting millions of polygons in real time.

Once you’ve added your terrain, to make it look realistic you can simply apply one of Vue’s dedicated landscape materials. Here, a new TerrainScape library offers materials based on new capabilities such as accurately stratified rocks built on recursive fractals and easily-adjustable sand, grass and soil mixes. Most striking of all are the materials based on Vue 8’s new displacement handling, which uses texture maps to actively deform the underlying object’s geometry.

Previously, Vue largely limited itself to simulating the shadowing effect of deformation via the bump channel. Now Vue 8 adds support for full normal mapping in the bump channel but, more importantly, also offers far more powerful dedicated displacement handling. With support for procedural functions, displacement in any direction and for in-built smoothing, the results can be extraordinary. For example, by mixing layers of large and small rocks created via displacement, Vue 8 can automatically create the effect of a boulder-strewn surface without having to resort to Ecosystem handling.

Of course, deforming geometry on the fly like this has a major performance impact of its own. However, e-on has reworked Vue 8’s rendering of displacement effects to make it between 50% and 150% faster. Throw in Vue 8’s rendering improvement of around 20% and it means that the enhanced end results that Vue 8 Infinite enables are realistically achievable in a practical production environment.

Vue’s main job is to tackle the creation of naturalistic scenes, but to bring the resulting landscape to life it needs to be populated. Vue’s existing, and excellent, handling of plants and ecosystems has been left largely unchanged, but Vue 8 Infinite does enhance its handling of imported models. In particular Poser 8 figures are now supported and you can re-pose and animate other objects directly in Vue, if you first convert them to Vue’s dedicated Rigged Mesh format.

Bringing external elements into Vue is one option to bring a scene alive, but working away from your main application’s modelling and animation tools is clearly not ideal. The apparently obvious alternative is to export your scene and bring it into your favourite modeller as a backdrop. However, that’s not ideal either, as you end up losing all the advantages that Vue brings – efficient mesh handling, spectral atmospheres, displacement materials, ecosystem painting and so on.

It looks like compromise is inevitable; but this is where Vue xStream comes in. Vue 8 xStream provides just one feature over-and-above the functionality in Vue 8 Infinite: it provides access to all of Vue 8 Infinite’s power from directly within your favourite high-end modeller – 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and Softimage.

This latest version of xStream adds little new functionality of its own. There’s new support for V-Ray rendering in 3ds Max and Maya, easier light matching including shadow density support and new icon-based access to functionality, but that’s about it. Except of course for Vue 8 xStream’s one must-have feature: access to the enhanced functionality and end results of Vue 8 Infinite.