EXCLUSIVES

e-on Software Vue 4 Professional
By David Hutchison

July 2004

Corel®'s announcement last year that it would no longer update the Macintosh® version of Bryce® has left Mac® users with only one professional, full featured landscape design tool to turn to, e-on Software's Vue 4. [U&I Software recently released Voyager 1.0 (reviewed in a recent issue of The MacDirectory); but this tool, while impressive, relies on a less exact, non-object based approach to landscape design.]

Vue 4 ($199) was also reviewed in a previous issue of The MacDirectory, but e-on Software has hardly been resting on its laurels now that Bryce has disappeared from the Mac platform. Vue 4 Professional ($599), a high-end version of Vue 4, was released for both Mac OS® X and Windows® in late 2003. And at the time of this writing, e-on Software was working hard to bring Curious Labs™ Poser® 5's dynamic hair and cloth animation support to Vue in the form of Mover 5, a Vue 4 companion plug-in.

Animation and Import/Export Support
Vue 4 marries a powerful object model approach to building landscapes with an attractive and intuitive interface that will appeal to Mac users with high expectations. In moving from Bryce to Vue 4 a few years back, I immediately noticed how much easier it was to use advanced features (such as path-based animation) in Vue 4 compared with Bryce. For example, Vue 4 features a user- friendly wizard for quickly creating motion paths that bank like a plane or cycle repeatedly.

Out of the box, the professional edition adds some (but not all) of the animation support found in Mover 4 ($99), a character/animation plug-in for the original Vue 4. Included are spin and vibration effects, twinkling stars, and (new to the professional edition) wind effects, including plants blowing lightly (or aggressively) in the air. These effects (especially the wind) add both realism and high drama to rendered animations.

Missing in action is Mover's support for importing and animating Poser character models. The professional edition of Vue 4 does, however, add tightly integrated support for importing and exporting other objects and, indeed, entire scenes to and from virtually every other 3D tool of note (e.g., Cinema 4D, LightWave 3D®, and Wavefront™). Advanced compositing and synchronization support are also included. Indeed, for animators, compositors, and artists who daily rely on a variety of 3D tools and need to move content between them, this is the major advantage of the professional edition over the entry-level Vue 4.

New Features
To the new import and export features, Vue 4 Professional adds unlimited resolution support for animations and support for creating new plant species (using Vue 4's SolidGrowth vegetation system). The lifecycle of a plant can be animated over time and new plants featuring subtle variations can be modeled on existing plants.

For designers with a programming background, Python scripting is also supported. Also on board are new options for rendering scenes quickly and/or with improved quality. Rendering a high resolution still image, let alone a DV quality animation can take a long time, even on a fast Power Mac® G5. For users with access to fast networked Macs and PCs, Vue 4 Professional allows up to five computers to work together to render both stills and animations up to five times faster. Additional network rendering licenses can also be purchased.

Vue 4 Professional supports pressure-sensitive tablets, a real boon for those looking for more intimate control over the terrains they sculpt. Many other enhancements (e.g. lighting, shadow, reflection, and atmospheric effects) are also included. The e-on Software web site hosts a chart that nicely compares the original and professional editions of the software.

One new feature that immediately came in handy was Vue 4 Professional's automatic software updating tool. Both the installer and the version of Vue 4 Pro that was installed from the CD crashed early on in the review process. Vue 4 Pro alerted me that there was an update to the software that it then downloaded and installed at my request. The updated version proved to be much more stable than the shipping version, albeit not completely crash proof.

Having recently worked with U&I Software's Voyager 1.0 tool, one thing I miss from Vue 4 Professional is the ability to quickly create, with one click, a randomized, but fully populated, landscape complete with distant mountains, a river and lake system, and, in the foreground, rocks and terrains. A wizard creation feature (not unlike Vue 4's excellent animation wizard) for creating a new landscape based on user input would be so much more appealing than the barren landscape that currently comprises a new project. Of course, once created, a new Vue 4 landscape could be edited and animated to a designer's heart's content.

Contact: e-on software, http://www.e-onsoftware.com. Pros: Tight integration with professional 3D design tools; new animation features; improved stability. Cons: Lacks Mover's support for importing and animating Poser models.