Software review: Vue 9

3D World looks at the improvements in e-on software’s 3D modelling application for digital environments

Price: $1,495 (xStream), $995 (Infinite) | Developer: e-on software | Platform Windows/Mac
Main features

• Relighting
• Improved terrain modelling/painting
• Parameter Publishing
• HyperBlobs
• Flicker reduction

Let’s start with some good news for Mac users: Vue 9 comes rebuilt (“from the ground up” according to e-on) as a 64-bit native Cocoa application that equals its Windows counterpart in speed and stability.
So, if you’re running Vue on Mac it seems like version 9 is a must-have upgrade regardless of other features.
But what about Windows users – how much does this update offer compared to Vue 8.5?
Firstly, Vue’s interface has been redesigned with softer grey colours, new icons and buttons, giving it a stylish, upto-date look and a comfortable feel overall.

Vue 9's redesigned interface

This is more than just a facelift though; some buttons have been re-organised in a more logical fashion. A handy Randomize button has been added to fractal terrains, materials and clouds, and the base grid is now infinitely adaptive, with a scale ruler in each window.
Also, measurements are now standardised across the board as real world units and degrees, making work in
Vue more coherent.
Surprisingly, a few rather archaic aspects of the interface have been left unchanged. The numerics tab, for
instance, still displays rotation as pitch, yaw and roll, and the colour editor remains modal, which can be a problem when using the new relighting tool.

Self publishing

Parameter publishing - you can creat your own control panels

By far the most significant new interface feature in Vue 9 is the ability to pull out (or ‘publish’) any parameter from the function editor and create your own customisable control panels in the terrain and material editors.
Without the need to jump back and forth between the function editor and other windows, editing complex procedural terrains and materials becomes much more fast and fluid.
Published material parameters have their own animation curves, which allows for much more precise material animation.
The last couple of versions brought substantial enhancements to terrain modelling, and Vue 9 continues this trend with more features and improved workflow.
Terrain paintbrushes have been re-organised into a Photoshop-style library with the ability to modify and save your own brushes with a dedicated brush editor.
This editor includes some very useful additions such as the much-needed ability to control the subdivision resolution for image-driven brushes, and the option to control brush behaviour with environment rules.
For example, you can now paint snow where you want it while still having it appear only on flat areas.
To further facilitate terrain painting, a separate ‘freeze mask’ can be layered in at any time to protect areas from being painted, and a new Smear brush comes in handy for shifting large chunks of terrain without destroying small detail.

Terrain paint brushes organised in a Photoshop-style library

Vue 9 also comes with a new terrain algorithm, the Rocky Mountain fractal – quite possibly the most powerful and flexible terrain fractal to date.
It can be used on its own, to create sharp-ridged, highly detailed alpine mountains, or mixed with a Terrain fractal for instance, to add rocky outcrops, stones or scree.
Like other fractal algorithms, it’s not easy to master but it packs a lot of power and can generate a surprising diversity of terrains.
Another very useful addition to the Terrain Editor is the ability to extend a fractal terrain, rather than just rescaling it.

Relight and Retopologize

The new Retopologize function automatically rebuilds the mesh of standard terrains, attempting to correct bad topology that results from drastic sculpting or stretching.
The Looseness parameter lets you define the amount of mesh relaxation, but even at minimum settings there’s a considerable amount of smoothing that destroys small-scale detail.
This limits the usefulness of the Retopologize tool, especially since you cannot apply erosion and effects to
retopologised terrains.
Relighting lets you tweak the intensity and colour of multiple lights as a post-render real-time process.
Vue’s lighting paradigm has always been based on a single light source – the sun – so in order to fully use the potential of relighting, a shift from the one-light paradigm is necessary.
With the help of the Influence Editor, you can restrict the main sunlight to the sky alone, add a second sun for extra light on the clouds, a third for the actual scene, add localised and ambient lights, and then fine-tune with relighting.
Vue’s relighting is derived from the actual raytraced render. This means that tweaking a light realistically affects shadows, reflections and refractions across the scene and changing the sun’s intensity and colour immediately changes the appearance of the sky, which consequently affects the ambient light.
It all works quite beautifully, making relighting a great tool for quickly generating different looks out of a single render.
What’s currently missing is a separate slider to control the indirect lighting contribution.

HyperBlobs - remarkably suitable for creating highly complex rock formations

HyperBlobs are not an entirely new technology, but rather a marriage between the two existing Vue features of MetaBlobs and HyperTextures – albeit with enhanced controls and functionality.
It’s now possible to add displacement on top of the HyperTexture material, control the subdivision amount and cut out floating, unconnected bits.
All this makes HyperBlobs remarkably suitable for creating highly complex, resolution-independent rock formations.
However, like fractal terrains, they are not very intuitive, and take time to calculate and render. It’s not possible to export HyperBlobs or convert them into simple meshes.
While they can be a great modelling tool for large-scale features, HyperBlobs aren’t very suitable for use in EcoSystems, for example. Therefore, a preset-based SolidGrowth-style rock generator is still high on our wish list.
One of the major points of criticism toward Vue has been the flickering that often occurs in animations with dense EcoSystems.
According to e-on, flicker reduction in Vue 9 isn’t an additional feature, but rather an internal improvement
in plant rendering, so it’s not selectable or user-controlled.
Our tests showed that while flickering hasn’t completely gone, it is considerably less obvious than in Vue
8.5, without any noticeable blurring or loss of detail.
So while Vue 9 doesn’t deliver anything major such as a new plant editor or rock generator, it does offer some exciting features like relighting and the Rocky Mountain fractal that open up new creative possibilities, together with substantial workflow enhancements.

Verdict

Pros
• New terrain modelling and painting tools
• Relighting is useful
• More customisable controls
• Rewritten 64-bit OSX version
Cons
• No improvement to rock generator
• No ambient relighting control
• Limited Retopologize
A solid and very worthwhile upgrade for any serious Vue artist – and for Mac users in particular

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