Information

Soon There May Be A Bering Strait Tunnel Connecting The U.S. To Russia

2011-09-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

The U.S. and Russia have cooperated in space, and now the two countries are adding high seas to the mix, having set their minds on connecting the Eurasian and American continents via an underwater tunnel in the Bering Strait according to Russia Today.
Originally conceived in 1906, during the rule of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II, the project had been deemed unrealistic by many, and put on hold by world wars and revolutions, but now seems to have recaptured the hearts of businessmen on three continents. The tunnel is expected to be twice the size of the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France. The 65 mile giant would be the key component of a 3,700 mile railroad reaching from Yakutsk, Russia to Canada’s British Columbia.
Russia Today adds:

“The project is already underway,” said an official from the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, Viktor Razbegin. “The rail track to Yakutsk that we have been building for the past 15 years has always been seen as the first part of the road. It will be finished in just about a year. However, the most important is the political decision which hasn’t been taken yet. There are multiple countries involved, and it will be hard.”

If finally approved, the ambitious project will demand a tremendous effort that will make use of Russian, American, Japanese and Chinese human and natural resources.
As of now, neither Alaska nor Siberia have railway links that reach the extremes of their respective territories.
Tourists are expected to appreciate the opportunity to travel overland from Europe to New York City. The journey through the whole range of different climates would be both spectacular and educational. It would also save travelers time – the tunnel would cross the International Date Line, changing clocks by nearly a full day.
Of course, the tunnel would also play a significant role in the transportation of raw materials from inland Siberia to the US and beyond, with the potential for freight rail to carry up to 100 million tons annually. The tunnel could also be used to develop a link between North America and Asia in terms of renewable energy transmission.
According to various estimates, the project will cost anywhere from $30 billion to $65 billion, and would be paid off over the next 15 years. The epic project could be completed by 2045.

Side Effects Releases Houdini 11

2010-08-28T06:21:00.001-07:00

FASTER, EASIER AND MORE PRODUCTIVE

New FLIP fluid solver, dynamic fracturing tools and a streamlined lighting
workflow give artists more control in their day-to-day work.

TORONTO: July 27, 2010 - Side Effects Software, an industry leader in 3D animation and visual effects software, is excited to announce the immediate release of Houdini 11. With a focus on productivity, Houdini 11 meets the needs of artists and studios who are looking for ways to accomplish more and work faster. From the new FLIP fluids solver, which offers amazing speed and control, to automatic fracturing of RBD objects, to a re-architected shader building workflow, artists will be able to work much more effectively with Houdini 11.

VFX Tools

“The new FLIP fluid solver is going to make a big difference for artists in production,” says Kim Davidson, President and CEO, Side Effects Software. “Not only is it up to 70 times faster, it draws on the power of our renowned particle tools to offer an unprecedented level of directability.”
The new dynamic fracturing tools are also designed to automatically create high-quality fracturing effects using a Voronoi-based algorithm. Artists can establish nicely shaped interior cracks and use volume “maps” to control the results.

Rendering and Lighting

The new version also brings important enhancements to Houdini’s lighting and shading workflows. Artists can make lighting decisions interactively in the viewport with new OpenGL effects such as GPU-assisted Volumes, unlimited lights and support for diffuse, specular, opacity, environment, bump and normal maps.
Houdini’s Mantra renderer is being used more and more in production and with Houdini 11 it becomes more accessible to artists. Houdini 11 ships with a robust general-purpose material which includes features such as sub-surface scattering and per-light exports. Houdini 11 includes new lights to make it easier to set up and render shots.

“With

Mantra, artists now have more options, more control and a significant improvement in speed,” says Davidson. “And as always, Mantra-tokens are unlimited which means that renderings can be distributed across as many machines as required.”

More Features
In addition, Houdini 11 includes a wealth of new features and enhancements which are all geared towards making the artist more productive:

User Interface

New, bezier-style connectors in the network editors
New tool palette in the network editor offers a gallery of nodes which can be dragged into the network.
Seamless integration of particles into dynamics networks and dynamics into geometry networks. This makes it easier to focus simulations on particular networks instead of simulating everything at the same time.
Enhancements to bundles to strengthen light-linking workflow
Z-up support

Vertex Normals

Support for vertex normals in OpenGL

Network Rendering

Network-distributed IPR
HQueue for Windows and Mac
Gold release of Houdini Cloud rendering tools

Volumes

Support for multi-resolution volumes with merging, feathering and surfacing tools VEX Volume Procedural
Volume Quality setting in viewport
Camera frustum volumes with tapering values.
Higher quality viewport visualization of volumes

Texturing

Support for Disney's "ptex" format

Point clouds

New point cloud surfacer with adaptive controls (generates a better surface than the existing particle fluid surfacer;  more applicable to games)
New point cloud functions

Fluids

New Fluid Shelf tools – target smoke, source from surface, resize voxel grid
SPH particle fluid solver up to twice as fast
Ability to rotate voxel grid to create non axis-aligned fluid container

Fur

More shelf tools for hair grooming
Control over guide hair distribution for faster interactivity while grooming
Combing direction can now be controlled by skin shaders
No need for rest attribute
Distributed wire solver output node

Cloth

Support for cloth pinching and layering
Direct support for non-stretchy cloth (stretch/shear/bend constraints)
Ability to simulate 0D cloth particles and to attach 1D cloth strings to 2D cloth surfaces - this provides as unified cloth solver for particles, wires and cloth surfaces.
Distributed cloth solver output node

Crowd Control

New CHOPS (foreach, iksolver, objectchain, transformchain, vector ) – for crowds and more
New python module that lets developers easily embed C++ code into python code

Pricing and Availablility
Houdini 11 is available immediately with Houdini Escape available for as low as $1,995 and Houdini Master available for as low as $6,695. The Free Apprentice Edition can be downloaded today from sidefx.com and Houdini Apprentice HD can be purchased for $99. Existing version 10 Apprentice HD customers can upgrade for $69.
With Houdini 11, Side Effects is launching a new Annual Subscription Plan which offers access to Houdini software, upgrades and support for a year at a time. This program lowers the up-front cost for studios interested in working with Houdini and gives them a flexible way to scale up their licenses. With this program, Houdini Escape is available for as low as $1,595 and Houdini Master is available for as low as $4,595.

Students win big at Intel ISEF 2010

2010-05-17T08:48:00.001-07:00

Enlarge Image

On May 14, 2010, Amy Chyao (center), Kevin Ellis (left) and Yale Fan earned top honors at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2010, the world's largest pre-college science competition. Chyao, 15, of Richardson, Texas, received $75,000 and the Gordon E. Moore Award, given for the first time in honor of the Intel cofounder and retired chairman and CEO. Ellis, 18, of Vancouver, Wash., and Fan, 18, of Beaverton, Ore., each received $50,000. (photo credit: Chris Ayers/Intel)

Hubble Story

2010-05-17T08:46:00.001-07:00



Fruit flies turn on autopilot High-speed video shows how bugs change course in a flash		Happy 20th, Hubble \| Story \| Flying observatory's cosmic portraits continue to capture hearts and minds

Apple Has Sold 1 Million iPads

2010-05-04T06:18:00.001-07:00

Apple has officially confirmed it has sold 1 million iPads. The company sold its one millionth iPad on Friday, April 30, just 28 days after the device’s release. More than 12 million apps from the App Store and 1.5 million e-books have been downloaded from the new iBookstore.

“One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

So, now that the iPad 3G is finally available, what everyone wants to know is: How well is this thing selling?

According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, it’s selling very well — pretty much as well as the Wi-Fi only iPad, in fact. About 300,000 3G iPads were sold on launch weekend.

Munster surveyed 50 Apple stores to arrive at this number. He concluded that the iPad 3G is essentially sold out, as only one store in 50 didn’t sell all of the iPads it had in stock by Sunday. Munster estimates that the overall number of iPads sold is over 1 million, and expects overall sales in 2010 will reach 4.3 million.

If Apple indeed sold 1 million iPads, we will probably hear it from Apple very soon — the company likes to brag about big numbers. On the other hand, Munster was wrong before, so we should probably take his estimates with a grain of salt.

Land Rover's new Surround Camera and Tow Assist technology for 2010.

2010-04-27T02:21:00.001-07:00

Surface Apps - SolidWorks eDrawing Viewer

2010-04-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

Surface Apps - DaVinci

2010-04-27T02:03:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Surface - Medical Advantages - BETT 2009

2010-04-27T02:02:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Surface Demo: Patient Consultation Interface by Infusion

2010-04-27T02:00:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Surface Games Pack

2010-04-27T01:58:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Surface - The Possibilities

2010-04-27T01:55:00.001-07:00

Interactive LED Coffee Table Demo

2010-04-27T01:48:00.001-07:00

SURFACE MICROSOFT - NEW GENERATION OF PC

2010-04-27T01:46:00.001-07:00

Vue 8 xStream

2010-04-26T01:02:00.003-07:00

Vue 8 xStream

The Integrated Solution

Full version from $1,495

Vue 8 xStream offers professional CG artists a complete toolset for creating and rendering exceptionally rich and realistic natural environments in 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and Softimage.
Access all the power of the world's leading 3D Digital Nature solution directly from within your favorite application. Create and edit beautifully detailed natural environments using your application's standard manipulators.
Render everything together inside 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D or Softimage, with full interaction between Vue and native elements, including 2-way mutual shadow casting, reflection, refraction and GI.

Vue 8 xStream works with:


3ds max	Cinema 4D	LightWave	Maya	Softimage

Vue 8 xStream provides a unique, unmatched solution for creating and integrating high quality natural scenery into any professional production pipeline, from architectural visualization to broadcast and film.

Vue 8 xStream Demo
Using Vue 8 xStream inside 3ds Max - 10' presentation

Vue Showreel
Check out amazing projects done by Vue artists around the world.

New in Vue 8

The release of Vue 8 marks e-on's on-going commitment to provide substantial, cutting-edge features and improvements to our valued users and customers who share our passion for Digital Nature. With this new release, all aspects of the program have been improved in the areas of natural scenery creation, precise artistic control, performance, immersive integration and content.

New Natural Scenery Creation Capabilities

Revolutionary 3D Terrain Sculpting Editor

Powerful 3D Sculpting Brushes

Create caves and overhangs

The Vue Terrain Editor is vastly improved with the addition of powerful 3D sculpting features for carving and molding terrain features and shapes. Paint overhangs, caves, and reliefs with the power and ease of 3D brush strokes.
The 3D sculpting brush contains several types of brush behaviors including the ability to sculpt, inflate, extrude, free form, invert, and smooth.
The intensity and tip profile of the 3D sculpting brushes can be adjusted by using falloff filters and bitmaps can be used to customize the shape and influence of the brush.
It is also now possible to reset 2D and 3D sculpting independently - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Localized Infinite and Procedural Terrain Scultping

Combine the best of both worlds with the ability to locally sculpt features on finite and infinite procedural terrains.
Let Vue automatically generate infinitely detailed expanses of terrain, then fine tune or completely rework localized areas of the terrain to suit your requirements. Touch up zones can be nested to provide unlimited artistic control.
Sculpt in roads, paths, and caverns while perserving the procedural details around the localized features.

Automatic localized subdivision

Revolutionary Smart Subdivision Technology

Using innovative dynamic refinement techniques, sculpting actions refine the terrain mesh based on the localized application of the 3D sculpting brush, automatically adding polygons only where they are needed, thereby optimizing the mesh density and increasing overall performance.
Paint freely at any level of detail, the smart subdivision technology automatically selects the appropriate LOD for you. Paint with brushes that are the equivalent of millions of polygons in real-time!

Sculpt terrains in context

Scene Context Sculpting

The terrain editor now supports sculpting in context of the entire scene, allowing terrains to be edited and shaped around scene elements.
For example, the terrain mesh can be sculpted to add reliefs around architectural elements and scene objects that are located in and around the terrain.

Large Amplitude Micro Displacement Engine

Separate Bump and Displacement Channels

Displacement can now be manipulated independently of the bump channel which delivers greater performance and more refined artistic control.
Displacement depth and scale is now accessible directly from the material editor and can use any procedural or texture map function as its input.

Cloned Displacement

The historical Vue method of using the bump channel to drive displacement is also preserved for those who wish to use this simplified but powerful displacement method.

Cloned displacement combines the bump noise into a composite noise to drive the bump and displacement output in a unified fashion.

Displacement in any Direction

Displacement can be adjusted to move in any user defined direction - horizontal, vertical, along the normal, or any combination. In addition, the displacement magnitude is adjustable in all three X, Y, and Z dimensions.

Normal Mapping

Vue 8 now supports the use of RGB normal maps to drive the bump channel. Normal maps can produce very finely detailed surface features and is widely used in CG and game applications.

Displacement Smoothing

High frequency artifacts can now be removed from displacement using displacement smoothing. The level of smoothing is fully range adjustable.

Atmospheres and Terrains

Spectral 3 Atmospheres

Vue 8 extends the realism of clouds and atmospheres with the introduction of Spectral 3 atmospheres.
Spectral 3 improves the quality and realism of internal cloud shadows, shadows projected on clouds, shadows projected onto objects, as well as the quality of godrays.

New Stratified Terrain Fractals

The addition of new Recursive Strata Terrain fractals optimize the creation of richly detailed stratified, terrain features.
These fractals are fully user adjustable and can be applied in combination with any Vue noise function to produce a wide variety of appearances.

New Material Control

A new material mapping option, “Relative to sea”, is now available for material altitudes. With this new option you can create materials that appear at certain altitudes, either relative to the sea, or absolute in world coordinates.
A new input node, “Sea level”, is also directly accessible from the Function Graphs.
The External Dependency nodes of the Function Graph can express object positions and dimensions in user-definable real-world units (meters, feet, etc). This is also the case for other nodes that express real world dimensions, such as Distance to object below, distance from camera, etc.
Also, real world dimensions can now be fed into the Position and Size outputs of the object graphs.
These new material and function options are available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Precise Artistic Control and Ease of Use Features

Re-Pose and Animate Rigged Meshes

Rigged and pre-animated mesh objects can now be re-posed and animated directly inside of Vue.
Users can create their own custom poses and movements directly inside of Vue with meshes that are converted to Vue's Rigged Mesh format (import fully rigged and animated meshes using Collada or use the MaxToVue exporter plug-in to export directly from 3ds Max). Vue pre-animated meshes are directly supported.

Easier Pose/Motion Handling

The new Motion Browser lets you visually select new poses or motions for your rigged meshes. The Motion Browser lets you interactively preview poses/motions on your rigged mesh, before applying them.
Typical poses/motions are also listed directly in the Skeleton Editor, to further facilitate the selection of poses for rigged meshes - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Multi-Materials

Multi-materials let you change in one single operation all the materials of any given object. Multi-materials can be saved for future use. They can also be copy-pasted or drag-dropped between the different objects of your scenes.
These new material and function options are available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Improved Open GL Engine and Viewport Display

Thanks to the addition of a new shader-based OpenGL engine, Vue now takes advantage of higher-end graphics cards to produce better visual quality and performance.
This includes normal mapped display of EcoSystem instances, specular highlighting and improved camera mapping previews. Renders can now be displayed in the background of all views improving the ability to visualize scenery objects in context.

EcoSystem Display Improvements

Dynamic EcoSystems can be seen in previews by setting the number of instances to be displayed near the camera.
Additionally, the Global Ecosystem is now available as an proxy object in the World Browser, with the ability to hide and show the global EcoSystem instances using a mouse click. Through the use of this proxy object, individual color and alpha masks of the Global EcoSystem can now be generated.
The rendering of shaded EcoSystem billboards is improved to provide a more accurate coloring and reduce flickering when moving around the scene - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update

Other Artistic Control Improvements

You can lock the render area to avoid accidental modifications - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
You can also lock browser collections - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Planes are now visible from all sides - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Accurate OpenGL previewing of materials mapped in World coordinates - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
GPU resources can be displayed in the status bar - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
It is now possible to hide all the layers in the World Browser - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
You can copy paste objects to hidden or locked layers - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
When deleting all objects from a layer, the layer is no longer deleted. You need to explicitly delete the layer - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
When installing the application, you can now easily restore the default installation folder - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Direct access to the alpha channel from the material editor
When saving an image, format options are accessible via a button, and not prompted for each time
Material-specific control of anti-aliasing and sub-ray quality parameters
Improved object drop accuracy
Added a Python node to the function graph for creating user programmable functions
New planetary mapping node with ability to set the location of origin (latitude & longitude) including “global origin” in Options panel. Cloud maps are correctly centered and aligned according to this setting.
New reference system for more precise control of parent-child object relationships
Default to ease-in ease-out for orientation keyframes
Added adjustable separator in animation timeline window to change the width of the animated items list
Material preview terrain option which displays a material mapped onto a small terrain object
Name of loaded atmosphere appears on Atmosphere Editor caption
Name of edited function added to Function Editor caption

Improved Performance

Faster Rendering

Thanks to massive improvements in the rendering architecture and memory handling, overall rendering performance has been increased by up to 20%, especially when rendering refractive materials and boolean/metablob operations*.

* The quality of preset render settings in Vue 8 is increased compared to Vue 7,
so render times may not appear shorter.

Displacement Rendering

The new displacement engine delivers speed improvements ranging from 50% to 150% faster compared to Vue 7. LOD subdivision calculations have now been normalized across all lighting models (both direct and indirect) reducing the memory requirements and increasing performance dramatically when rendering displaced objects.
The total amount of memory allocated to displacement mapping can be set in the options panel.
The rendering of displacement on standard terrains is greatly improved and no longer contingent upon the resolution of the terrain - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update

Other Performance Improvements

The quality of indirect lighting is increased in Preview mode - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
The behavior of the Full Quality Near Camera option is optimized to allow faster high quality previewing - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
The size of the render buckets is automatically adjusted to maximize use of all cores on small renders - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
The speed of handling of complicated group hierarchies is significantly increased - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Default views are automatically resized to adjust according to internal units - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Added dual destination render option - display to screen while rendering to disk
When rendering to disk, image can be saved at user defined intervals
Added the ability to generate a detailed log file for network renders

Deeper Immersive Interoperability

Integrated xStream Interface

Vue features are now directly accessible using icons within the host application interface (Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema 4D).
Most Vue dialogs are now non-modal which allows access to the host application even with the Vue dialogs open. This is particularly useful e.g. when painting EcoSystems.

Support for V-Ray in Max and Maya

Vue 8 xStream is compatible with the popular renderer V-Ray from chaos group, both inside of 3ds Max and Maya.
xStream for Max and Maya handles cross-shadowing, reflections, refractions and global illumination with V-Ray just as it does with Mental Ray.

Easier Light Matching

In Vue 8 xStream, it is now possible to adjust Vue and native lights independently. You have 3 options for matching Vue and native lights: auto (like in Vue 7), ignore light in Vue and manual (the Vue light and its native counterpart are edited independently).

The shadow density is now automatically matched to that of the host application (Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema 4D only).
It is also possible manually control (via a dedicated setting) the brightness of Vue's radiosity to better match that of the host application.

Render Time Consistency

With Vue 8 xStream, the render settings of the host application can be automatically adjusted to match the Vue settings. As a result, render times in the host application are more consistent with those achieved in Vue stand-alone.

Sample Scenes

The Extras disk of Vue 8 includes sample scenes showing similar xStream setups in the supported host applications:

Other xStream Enhancements

Direct access to the sea level via xStream interface.
Improved previewing of procedural terrains in host application.

General Import/Export Improvements

Max->Vue Exporter: convert unrigged objects to standard meshes - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
Improved terrain exports - this feature is available in the free Vue 8.4 update
32 bit floating point EXR image format support (import and export)
Improved object exports, particularly with Solidgrowth™ vegetation
Support for Poser 8 (standalone mode)

Content Additions

A number of new content items have been added or extended which take advantage of the new Vue 8 features including:

TerrainScapes material library for creating a variety of terrain landscapes
Metanode-based displacement materials for creating rocks and stones
Metanode-driven color functions and materials for terrain and rock colors
Metanode-adjustable sand, grass, and soil materials
Terrain Countour Mapping material with associated Python program for producing altitude legends
Finite and infinite procedural terrain presets utlizing the new Strata fractal filter

Also New from Vue 7.5

For users who decided to skip release 7.5 and upgrade directly from Vue 7 to Vue 8, the next page is a reminder of the new features added in Vue 7.5 that are also part of Vue 8 (and new to Vue 7 users).
If you already own Vue 7.5 or are very familiar with its features, you may like to skip that page.

Also New from 7.5

If you are still using Vue 7 and didn't upgrade to 7.5, the features introduced in release 7.5 and described on this page will also be new to you*.

All upgrades are included free of charge with maintenance.

Planetary Rendering

Infinite Procedural Terrains

Vue 8 supports truly infinite procedural terrains that extend forever. You can move the camera as far as you like, the terrain continues; you will just uncover new parts of it!

Spherical and Planetary Terrains

Vue 8 can render entire planets! Simply create a procedural terrain and Vue will easily convert it into a planet.
There are now 3 types of infinite procedural terrains:

flat terrains, ideal for close-ups,
spherical terrains, ideal for mid-range shots,
and planetary terrains, ideal for long-distance shots of entire planets.

You can easily switch between the different types of infinite terrains, although the terrain geometry may be modified in the process.

Easy Planetary Navigation

The trickiest aspect of planetary creation is the ability to work in a coordinate system that is not easily understood. For instance, how would you line up trees at the surface of a planet?
Thanks to the new spherical abstraction gizmos, it's incredibly easy to move around or align elements at the surface of a planet. Vue dynamically unwraps the surface of your planet so you can continue to work in your views as if the terrain were flat. Just line up objects and Vue will automatically move and rotate them so they fit neatly where they should be at the surface of the planet!

Real-World Spherical Clouds

Vue 8 features the ability to import cloud maps to recreate real-world skyscapes over entire planets.
Use any cloud density map, including daily maps from the internet. Add cyclones where you need them by painting them in! Then load the cloud density data using the dedicated tool and Vue will generate the corresponding clouds.

Cloud Masks

Generate color and alpha masks of your clouds using the multi-pass renderer.
Cloud colors are automatically adjusted to produce the expected result when used in combination with the cloud mask.

Improved OpenGL Display

Realtime OpenGL Display

Realistic Sun Shadows

The sun now casts realistic shadows in the OpenGL views. This way, you get instant feedback on the shadows that will be cast by the sun in the final render.

Colored EcoSystem Billboards

Changes made to EcoSystem instance colors are now displayed in the Vue OpenGL viewports. This way, you immediately get a better idea of what the final render will look like.

Animated EcoSystem Populations

On top of creating EcoSystems with populations of animated elements, it is now possible to create populations that evolve over time.
This way, you can create such effects as a forest expanding to gradually cover a mountain, or the receding of vegetation at the border of a desert.

Camera Mapping

Vue 8 makes it easy to create camera mappings. Render an image, then project this image back through the camera onto a simplified verion of your scene.
Camera mapping is ideal, for instance, to create animated matte paintings without having to carry the cost of rendering the animation with full geometry.

Other New Features

Save/reload complete object graphs.
Save individual G-buffer channels.

Overview

Creating and Editing Vue Environments

Vue 8 xStream operates as a fully integrated plug-in for 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and Softimage. It adds all of Vue's dedicated environment creation tools to your application's interface.
Using these tools, you can create complete, hyper-realistic 3D environments without leaving your favorite application.
This includes (among others) the ability to create atmospheric effects, build procedural terrains, grow SolidGrowth trees or even populate entire forests.

Edit Vue Elements inside your Application

Proxy geometry is dynamically created by Vue 8 xStream inside the host application so that you can use your application's standard manipulators to move, rotate or resize each element of the Vue environment individually.
You can use all standard tools of your application (such as alignment, scripting or even add fur to Vue elements), and you can make Vue elements interract dynamically with native objects (e.g. collision detection, etc).
Animation of Vue items can be done either through Vue (e.g. for wind effects), or using the host application's animation tools. Both types of animation are naturally combined seamlessly.
Vue 8 xStream for 3ds Max, Softimage and Cinema 4D will even let you paint EcoSystems interactively (on Vue objects or on native objects), directly through the host application's viewports*.

* This feature is currently only available in 3ds Max, Softimage and Cinema 4D. LightWave and Maya support is planned, but is still pending development by Newtek/Autodesk.

Full Support of All Vue Elements

You can create Vue environments directly in the host application, or you can load ready-made environments that were designed on a stand-alone version of Vue (Vue 8 Infinite, or Vue 8 xStream running in stand-alone mode - xStream can run either as a plug-in or as a stand-alone application).
All components of the Vue environments are supported by Vue 8 xStream, including complete EcoSystems, all types of atmospheres, cameras, lighting, all plants, all terrain types and all procedural materials.
Animated scenes are also supported, including wind animations for plants and EcoSystems, atmosphere and cloud animations, and all animated materials.
All imported meshes included in the Vue scene will be loaded as well.
Lights are automatically converted into their Maya/Max/LightWave/Cinema/Softimage counterparts, and the atmosphere is converted into a special environment shader.

Integrated Rendering

Compatibility

A single license of Vue 8 xStream can be used with all compatible applications and renderers installed on your system, without requiring the purchase of any Extra Renderer licenses (unlike what was the case with Vue 6 xStream).

Vue 8 xStream for Maya works with MentalRay, V-Ray and Maya software renderer.
Vue 8 xStream for Max works with MentalRay and V-Ray.
Vue 8 xStream for Softimage works with MentalRay.
Vue 8 xStream for LightWave and Cinema 4D works with the native renderer.

The Render Process

Max car rendered in a Vue environment

Upon rendering, xStream kicks-in its own render engine, which works in parallel to the native renderer. This assures that the Vue elements will look exactly as if they were rendered inside Vue, and also helps speeding up the rendering of polygon-heavy elements such as terrains and EcoSystems.
However, this is a completely transparent process. There is no need to deal with the xStream renderer. Parameters such as render resolution and anti-aliasing quality need only to be set for the native renderer. If necessary, you can override these settings easily.

Maya sphere in Vue environment

Why Two Renderers?

Wouldn't it be more simple to convert Vue environments to polygons and have the native renderer render everything?
Unfortunately, this is not possible:

Vue environments easily comprise billions of polygons. Plants are unique and sway in the wind. None of the native renderers would be able to handle this level of complexity.

The Vue renderer features unique technologies specifically designed to improve the render quality of natural elements (procedural rendering, advanced shading algorithms, etc).

These technologies are simply not available in other renderers.

Integration with MentalRay and V-Ray

Vue 8 xStream is compatible with MentalRay for Max, Maya and Softimage and V-Ray for Max and Maya. This compatibility extends to specific technologies, such as Mental Ray Sun&Sky, V-Ray Sun&Sky, Mental Ray Photometric Lights or Mental Ray Distributed Bucket Rendering.
Vue 8 xStream will automatically adjust its settings to match the effects of these features, whenever they are used.

Rendering Flexibility

Vue 8 xStream lets you easily disable the rendering of the Vue sky and/or atmospheric effects (e.g. when using mr or V-Ray Sun&Sky). You can even disable the rendering of Vue content altogether, for instance if you want to perform tests on the host-application-part of the scene. If the entire Vue content is disabled from render, the Vue xStream plug-in won't be loaded altogether.

Vue atmospheric effects can be rendered alongside other volumetric plug-ins running in the host application (contingent upon the implementation of the plug-in). For instance, rendering alongside LightWave HyperVoxels or Maya Fluids is possible.

G-buffer and Multi-Pass Rendering

Vue 8 xStream offers powerful g-buffer and multi-pass rendering features, for even greater post-processing flexibility.

Workflow

Integrated Interface

Vue features are directly accessible from the host application interface, via menu commands or icons (Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema 4D).
All Vue dialogs are non-modal, allowing access to the host application even with the Vue dialogs open. This is particularly useful e.g. when painting EcoSystems.

Matching Scene Scales

Vue 8 xStream automatically matches its unit system so that the sizing of Vue elements matches that of the host application. This ensures that a one foot-large cube in Vue also measures exactly one foot in the host application.
It is also possible to customize the scaling ratio between Vue and the host application.

Matching Lights

You can adjust Vue and native lights independently using one of 3 options: automatic, ignore light in Vue and manual (the Vue light and its native counterpart are edited independently).
The shadow density is automatically matched to that of the host application (Max, Maya, Softimage, and Cinema 4D only).
If needed, it is also possible to manually control (via a dedicated setting) the brightness of Vue's radiosity to better match that of the host application.

Render Times

The render settings of the host application can be automatically adjusted to match the Vue settings. As a result, render times in the host application are consistent with those achieved in Vue standalone.

Display

For each element in the environment, Vue generates a 3D proxy in the host application. These proxies are displayed, like any other native object, using the application's OpenGL or Direct3D engine.
You can change the level of detail of proxies to speed up the refresh rate of very large Vue scenes.

File Management

Stand-alone Vue scenes are saved in Vue format. Combined scenes are saved either in the native format of your 3D application, or can be split as native/Vue scenes. In this case, the native scene will reference the Vue scene.

Animated or re-posed Poser figures, as well as Poser objects rendered
using the Poser shader tree cannot be loaded with the Vue scene.

Terrains

Sculpt 3D Terrains in Real-Time

Create caves and overhangs

Revolutionary Solid3D™ terrain modeling technology lets you interactively carve and shape terrains in real time. Using 3D brushes, mold and shape terrains into virtually any shape imaginable.
Create caves, grottos, overhangs, rivers, canyons with the ease of modeling in clay-like fashion. Brushes can also be used to interactively add erosion and geological effects and blend details using the 3D smoothing brush.
Standard base terrains are generated using either one of the 8 presets (mountain, peak, eroded, mounds, iceberg, glacier, dunes, lunar), a grayscale image, or by importing USGS DEM data. Vue fully supports 16-bit heightfield data imported from external applications.

Automatic localized subdivision

Automatic Localized SubDivision

Solid3D employs innovative localized subdivision technology which automatically refines the underlying mesh based on the level of detail being added.
This allows you to concentrate on the creative process of sculpting terrain features without having to worry about mesh geometries. Freely sculpt the equivalent of millions of polygons with real-time interactive performance.

3D Sculpt Procedural Terrains

Scene Context Sculpting

Sculpt terrains in context

Scene elements such as buildings and vegetation can be viewed in the Solid3D terrain modeler allowing you to sculpt terrain details around objects.
Deform the terrain surface around any object for a more naturally blended appearance.

Paint Material Distribution Maps on Terrains

The Solid3D terrain modeler allows you to paint custom material distributions. Paint riverbeds and rocks along with the associated material with a simple brush stoke.
Material distribution maps can also be created in conjunction with Solid3D global geologic effects. Ideal for placing a different material in riverbeds in seconds!

Render Infinitely Detailed Procedural Terrains

Procedural terrains provide an unlimited level of detail: move your camera closer, and more detail is seamlessly added. Vue employs powerful algorithms to rapidly create and render the massive micro-polygon datasets of displaced infinite procedural terrains.
There is no limit to the size of procedural terrains. They can virtually stretch to the horizon, or even become planets. Yet whatever their size, there will always be enough detail, even in extreme close-ups.

Powerful Terrain Function Editor

Terrain interface (function editor)

Deep-level editing of procedural terrains is performed in the powerful function graph editor, where a wide selection of procedural noises, filters, math functions and image data nodes can be combined to define elaborate geological features.
Combine dedicated terrain-production fractal algorithms with specific natural color production nodes to create stunningly elaborate and natural-looking scenery in no time.

Sculpt Infinite Terrains

Procedural terrains are fully sculptable using the Solid3D terrain modeler.

Sculpting can also be confined to specific area or zone making it possible to create custom details on infinite terrains. Create custom rock formations or valleys surrounded by infinitely detailed mountains.

Rapid Terrain Creation with Presets

Using the procedural terrain presets included with Vue, you can choose a style of terrain and Vue will create a unique terrain of the corresponding style, complete with all associated materials. This includes both finite and infinite procedural terrains.

Create Planetary and Spherical Terrains

Vue supports the creation of spherical and planetary terrains. Any procedural terrain can be converted into a spherical terrain or a planet with the click of a button.
Render expansive celestial planets and vistas with ease and zoom in to reveal the smallest granular level details down to single pebble.

Vegetation

Innovative SolidGrowth™ 4 Plant Technology

SolidGrowth is e-on's unique vegetation synthesis and rendering technology.
Widely recognized as the most efficient and realistic vegetation system around, the fourth iteration of SolidGrowth features powerful flicker-reducing algorithms capable of render animations with millions of moving plants!
SolidGrowth is based on random growth technologies that ensure no two plants of the same species will ever look exactly alike and will automatically animate plants so that they gently sway in the breeze, or twist and bend in strong winds. It also simulates the different color tones found in nature for even greater variety and realism.
SolidGrowth works seamlessly with the EcoSystem technology, and together they present unmatched capabilities for efficiently creating highly detailed, natural animated environments. This technology features advanced rendering algorithms that are capable of drastically reducing the flickering of distant plant animations.
Vue 8 contains a library of over 160 plant species (grass, shrubs, trees and underwater plants). Many more SolidGrowth species are available at Cornucopia3D.

Customize Vegetation in the SolidGrowth Plant Editor

The Plant Editor lets you easily customize any of the plants included with Vue and allows creation of your own, unique plant species.
Adjust the settings for the entire plant, or work on individual subsets of the plant (trunk, branches leaves...). Textures for any subset can be edited or replaced, so you can use your own pictures and scans to create new realistic leaves and trunks.
Save your newly created species which will then behave like any other SolidGrowth species: each plant will look slightly different, yet the overall characteristics of the species will be preserved.

Variations of the same species

In addition to global wind and breeze, individual wind and wind generators, it is possible to animate any parameter in the plant editor, allowing the creation of effects such as plant growth and decay, orplant morphing.
Vue makes it easy to use the billboard method to add low-poly trees and figures to architectural visualizations. The alpha plane object provides slots for alpha and color maps, and an additional billboard option to automatically orient itself to face the active camera, with or without vertical rotation.

EcoSystem Generation III

Revolutionary EcoSystem™ Generation III

The EcoSystem revolution has redefined the way CG artists create landscape images. What seemed utterly impossible became easily feasible. Nightmarish tasks became a pleasant ride. With this third generation of EcoSystem, this ground-breaking technology has been improved again: the revolution marches on!

Real world natural environments are extremely complex. Just think of the millions of plants, trees and rocks that make up the landscape around you.
Creating such highly detailed scenes in 3D is an exhausting task, both in terms of hard work and computer resources. Most 3D programs, in fact, are unable to deal with the huge polygon count required to create, say, a realistic forest scene with millions of trees.
With e-on’s patented EcoSystem technology, you can easily populate your scenes with millions of plants, trees, stones and other objects, to achieve a totally new level of natural complexity and detail while keeping Vue’s performance and display running smoothly.

Select a SolidGrowth plant species and EcoSystem will populate your scene with numerous variations of that plant, not just “hard copies”. These plants are automatically animated with breeze.
Of course, an EcoSystem can contain more than one plant type: add an unlimited number of plants, rocks and other objects to the population list, and control each item’s relative presence and size within the EcoSystem.

Automated Smart Scattering

The EcoSystem does not merely scatter the objects randomly across the surface, but actually decides where to place them according to the relief of the terrain.
So just like in nature, more trees will grow on flat areas than on steep slopes, and no objects will be placed where they are likely to “fall down”. You can control the influence of this effect easily.
In addition, Vue will automatically recognize foreign objects, and reduce the presence of EcoSystem items around them.

Dynamic EcoSystem Population

EcoSystem Dynamic Population technology lets you create dense EcoSystems that extend way beyond the horizon, without concern over the number of instances!
This revolutionary technology is capable of handling the near-infinite number of instances required to populate terrains in the far distance.
To maximize efficiency, it will also dynamically populate areas of your scene, only as they become visible to the camera.

Animated EcoSystem Populations

Paint Plants and Objects with EcoSystem Painting

The EcoSystem painter lets you interactively paint Ecosystems over any surface (or group of surfaces). It can be used for editing EcoSystem materials, or as a stand-alone tool.
The latter option allows you to paint EcoSystems on the fly on any object in the scene.
Painting can be performed with a mouse or with a tablet, which gives you the ability to control additional parameters through pressure.

Free Paint

You can paint over any number of selected objects, even the entire scene. While you paint in any view, the instances are automatically dropped and aligned to the surface.
You can paint a mix of all the items in your population list, or paint any single item separately. Brush strokes can be undone at any time, or you can clear the whole EcoSystem for a fresh start.

4 Painting Tools

Using the Ecosystem painter brush tools, instances can be applied individually or painted on in airbrush fashion.
The coloring and scaling brush interactively modifies the size and/or colors of an EcoSystem while the eraser tool allows instances to be removed.

The Instance Selector

The instance selector tool lets you select or deselect instances and move them around in the scene to a precise location.
You can also convert instances into real objects, modify them, and then put them back into the EcoSystem later if required.

Powerful Layered EcoSystem Materials

EcoSystems behave just like regular materials. You can save them as a material and create a whole library of EcoSystems, which can be used later for other scenes and objects.
A single EcoSystem material can have any number of layers, each layer with its own population list and full set of controls.
The fact that the EcoSystem are treated like a material means that you can take advantage of Vue’s powerful material and function editor to control almost every aspect.
For example, use a fractal noise generator to control the distribution of EcoSystem objects, or use a bitmap to limit distribution to specific areas.
Using the material layer environmental parmeters tab, EcoSystems can be influenced by altitude, slope and orientation.

Affinity and Repulsion

Layers in an EcoSystem material can also influence one another. By using the affinity and repulsion parameters, it’s possible to define a relationship between two layers.
For instance, using affinity, trees in the first layer can affect the distribution of grass in the second layer, so that the grass grows only around the trees.

Enhanced EcoSystem Display

EcoSystems can be displayed in eight different modes (none, billboard, wireframe box, filled box, wireframe, flat shaded and full, smooth shaded and the new shaded billboard display), plus a camera controlled dynamic level of detail option. This gives you the flexibility to optimize your workflow, whatever your hardware resources and project requirements are.
Display quality can be linked to the camera. Instances in a user-defined radius around the camera will be displayed at full quality, while the rest will fall back to the specified display mode. The camera-controlled LOD automatically updates as the camera is moved around, making camera placement inside EcoSystems much easier.

Colored EcoSystem Billboards

Changes made to EcoSystem instance color, size and position are displayed in the Vue OpenGL viewports. This way, you immediately get a better idea of what the final render will look like.

Atmospheres

Cutting-Edge Atmospheric Technology

Vue features an elaborate atmosphere engine that does much more than mere backgrounds. It provides an accurately simulated environment that affects all the elements of the scene, and behaves according to nature’s rules.
The appearance of an object in a Vue scene is directly affected by the position of the sun, the cloud cover, the amount of dust in the air, or the humidity level.
Because projects often require different approaches to the simulation and rendering of atmospheres, Vue offers no less than four different atmospheric models, ranging from simple background skies to photo-based environments and physically accurate atmospheres.
Within this wide choice you will find the solution that best fits your project’s needs.

Standard Atmosphere Model: Fast Rendering

The standard model lets you control sky appearance through the use of color gradients.
You can create an unlimited number of fully editable cloud layers, control fog and haze densities, or add special effects like twinkling stars, rainbows and ice rings.
All atmospheric elements can be fully animated. The standard model’s main advantages are ease of use and fast rendering.

Volumetric Atmosphere Model: Enhanced Realism

The volumetric model offers a compromise between the standard and spectral models, giving you a higher level of realism, yet rendering faster than spectral atmospheres.
Unlike the standard atmosphere, the appearance of the sky and sun is not defined by color gradients. It's directly affected by haze fog settings and by the sun’s position, much like in a real atmosphere.
The volumetric model is especially suited for animations: simply moving the sun around produces beautiful color and lighting shifts.

Spectral 3 Atmosphere Model: Hyper-Realism

The 3^rd generation of Spectral Atmospheres is a physically-based, hyper-realistic model accurately simulates the behavior of real-world atmosphere and lighting according to weather conditions.
The appearance of the sky, sun and clouds as well as the character of direct and ambient light, are all affected by the delicate balance between the elements that constitute the atmosphere: air, dust and water particles.
The Spectral model provides its own set of controls that let you adjust each element’s density and height, as well as additional parameters like aerial perspective, sun corona, scattering anisotropy and rendering quality.
Using the Spectral model ensures a complete coherence of all the elements of a scene.

Spectral Cloud Layers

The spectral atmosphere engine is capable of rendering highly realistic volumetric clouds with accurate lighting and volumetric shadows. Spectral cloud layers are three-dimensional, allowing you to create anything from thin ground fog to massive Cumulonimbus.
You can place as many layers as you need, at any height, and even combine spectral and standard cloud layers (to add high altitude Cirrus, for instance).
Spectral layers are created using any type of noise function, and provide a wide range of control over density, cover, illumination and even vertical profile.
You can easily control the overall shape of the clouds, from feathery to clumpy and create skies with as many overlapping spectral cloud layers as you like for complex and unbelievably realistic cloudscapes!

They look equally good from below or from above, and thus are perfectly suited for fly-through sequences, as well as ground fog or “mountains peaking through clouds” effects. With the right settings, you can produce natural phenomena like God-rays.

Illumination of Clouds

Vue contains break-through algorithms that are capable of rendering extremely detailed volume clouds and their associated shadows at an incredible pace.
These algorithms are capable of better simulating the intricate complexity of cloud geometry, as well as the indirect illumination that takes place inside the clouds and the internal and external shadows they produce.
Cloud cross shadowing is fully user controllable allowing clouds to cast and receive shadows from scene objects.

Local Lights in Clouds

In addition to the sunlight, you can make any light-source in the scene illuminate clouds, including local lights. This allows the creation of true-to-life thunder storms, search lights or illuminated fly through clouds.

Real-World Spherical Clouds
You can import cloud maps to recreate real-world skyscapes over entire planets.
Use any cloud density map, including daily maps from the internet. Add cyclones where you need them by painting them in! Then load the cloud density data using the dedicated tool and Vue will generate the corresponding clouds.

Cloud Mask

Environment Mapping Model: HDRI Rendering

Especially suited for architectural or product visualization, this model lets you easily set up an environment based on panoramic photographs.
By using Vue’s image based lighting, HDRI support and global reflection mapping you can create a seamless integration between your scene and the background plates.

Natural Elements

Realistic Water

The Water Surface Editor lets you easily control the look of your water surfaces.
The editor provides an easy-to-use interface that controls a complex function graph to easily switch from still water to stormy weather, complete with foam at the tip of the waves. The editor offers either a global slider, or a set of parameters to control the water surface more accurately.
You can further customize the look of your water using the Water Surface Editor-compatible MetaWater materials.

Custom Fog and Clouds using MetaClouds

MetaClouds are stand-alone clouds that can be moved around, scaled, rotated and modified.
Vue includes a library of preset MetaCloud shapes. MetaClouds are procedurally generated, so even if you use several copies of the same preset, each will be uniquely different.
You can modify the shape of MetaClouds by hand, and even animate the different parts of the cloud. By combining several MetaClouds you can easily create elaborate cloud formations.

Rock Your World

Vue includes several ways of creating rocks and stones. The Vue rock object produces unique rock instances and is ideal for low to medium density rock formations.
Eco-Rock materials are EcoSystems composed of rock objects which can be used to build large eco populations of stones and pebbles. Ideal for stone-filled beaches or rocky shorelines.
Rock ground materials include a number of Vue materials which can produce bump or displacement-driven rock and stone distributions. Ideal for large, high density stone distributions covering a wide area.

Add Celestial Stars and Planets

Planets can be added by using the Vue Planet object which contains a variety of celestial bodies and allows you to adjust the phase and brightness of the Planet in the sky.
Add stars and ice rings using the atmosphere editor to create stunning celestial skies.

Create Your Own Natural Elements and Objects

In addition to plant and terrain modeling, Vue offers the following modeling tools:

A comprehensive 3D text editor with custom bevels and extrudes, up to 8 textures per character, and vector data import.
Non-destructive Boolean modeling with complete real-time control and preview of all operators.
Organic Metablob modeling that works with all primitive types.

Lighting

Vue offers a multitude of lighting options to create stunning outdoor and indoor scenery including cutting edge global illumination and radiosity engines, HDR image based lighting, a complete set of light types with raytraced and mapped soft shadows and a full-featured lens flare editor.

Feature-Rich Direct Illumination

Planar and Multi-shape Area Lights

In addition to point, spot and directional lights, Vue offers two types of area lights: planar and multi-shape.
The latter lets you convert any mesh into an area light with a simple mouse click. This greatly enhances Infinite’s indoor lighting capabilities, making it possible to create any type of light fixture, in any shape.

Optimized Raytraced Soft Shadows

For optimal quality/time ratio, Vue offers full custom control over the production of raytraced shadows, with separate settings for optimization, quality, blurring and traced shadow rays.
These new strategies produce extremely smooth, non-grainy soft shadows.

AccuShadows™ Soft Shadow Mapping

As an alternative to raytraced shadows, AccuShadows™ creates fast soft shadows using shadow maps, giving you full control over map size, quality, sampling level and filter bias.
The softness of mapped shadows can be light-based, object-based or constant.

Light Effects

Double clicking on any light launches an editor that conveniently groups all light controls into a single tabbed interface.
Here you can add volumetric effects, apply flat or spherical gels, create fully customizable lens flares, define attenuation and color graphs, and set specular and diffuse influence on a per-object basis.

Life-Like Indirect Lighting

Vue’s GI and radiosity engines are unique in the fact that they are specifically optimized for outdoor renders, and can actually render infinite scenery in a finite amount of time. The indirect lighting capabilities of Vue also produce stunning indoor renders as well.
Vue’s EasyGI™ single-slider quality control offers a no-hassle lighting setup, while the Advanced Effects panel provides precise control over all indirect lighting parameters.

Global Illumination Engine

GI works hand in hand with all of the atmosphere models. Sky colors, cloud cover, haze, fog and other atmospheric parameters all directly affect the character of the ambient light.
However, you can override this connection by manually modifying skylight intensity and color.
GI can be enabled/disabled on a per-object or per-material basis.

Ambient Occlusion

The ambient occlusion option allows you to render GI effects considerably faster.

By controlling the occlusion distance threshold you can precisely define where GI soft shadows can be ignored, and thus eliminate the need for unnecessary calculations.

Radiosity Engine

Vue’s radiosity engine utilizes all the latest advances in rendering technology to deliver superior image quality and accuracy at a blazing speed.
Whether illuminating large outdoor scenes or indoor shots Vue produces renderings of striking realism.

Illumination Baking

Vue can bake the indirect lighting into illumination maps, either per-object or for the entire scene. Illumination maps are saved together with the object/scene.
You can control the overall baking quality and map size. Automatic illumination baking can significantly reduce render times for animations.

HDR Image Based Lighting

The environment mapping atmosphere model lets you easily set up IBL, with full support for HDR image files.
You can use separate maps for environment, lighting and reflection, as well as offset the map's position, and control exposure and contrast.

Rendering

Based on a solid ray-tracing foundation, Vue’s render engine incorporates all of today’s high-end features, yet stands out in its ability to handle huge poly counts quickly and efficiently.
Unique technologies allow for a tight integration with the atmosphere engine and for optimized rendering of EcoSystems and procedural terrains. Vue’s render engine outputs top-quality images and animations with superb overall performance.

Advanced Rendering Features and Controls

Vue’s rendering technology is fully instrumented, providing precise artistic control while maintaining a production-oriented approach for ease of use and flexibility.

Anti-Aliasing and Depth of Field

Anti-aliasing control offers 5 different anti-aliasing strategies (crisp, sharp, smooth, blurred and automatic), optional mip-mapping, and precision sliders for both object and texture anti aliasing.
Vue’s anti-aliasing strategies optimize the distribution of samples resulting in significantly smoother edges and much higher quality images.
Depth of field is fully user controllable and provides smooth, progressive results.

Flicker-Free Plant Rendering Technology

One of the most challenging aspects of rendering natural scenery is the notorious flickering associated with distant vegetation.
Vue’s ability to create scenery containing millions of plants means that for every pixel of every frame, the render engine must handle a large number of overlapping polygons, requiring high anti-aliasing settings in order to get rid of animation flickering.
SolidGrowth 4 technology lets you render even the most densely populated, animated scenes with a minimum amount of flickering using techniques such as texture filtering and proprietary anti-flickering algorithms.

Rendering Effects and Image Adjustments

Vue features a variety of rendering effects and image adjustments to tailor final output to your liking.
Natural film response adds a cinematic film-like quality to the final image.
Auto exposure automatically adjusts and balances under-lit and over-exposed areas based on the amount of light in the scene.
Image adjustments such as gamma, saturation, gain, and hue shifting allow you to fine-tune the final output without ever leaving Vue.

Flexible Rendering Options

The render control panel offers precise control over every single render parameter, giving you the flexibility you need to complete rendering on schedule without sacrificing quality.

360 degrees render

Choose between distributed ray traced or hybrid 2.5D motion blur, fine tune the level of traced reflections, super-sampling, soft shadows, blurred reflections, depth of field, caustics, etc.
Rendering can be performed in any viewport (including orthogonal views). Viewport rendering can be set to its own quality level, different from the main render settings. This lets you instantly switch between draft and production render qualities.

Panoramic and Spherical Rendering

Vue offers both standard and spherical panoramic rendering with an adjustable angle up to 360 degrees.

Camera aberration sample

This is especially useful for creating and exporting environment HDR images and backgrounds.

Camera Aberrations

Because real-life camera lenses are built from optical glass elements (or other refractive materials), it is virtually impossible to create lenses that don't introduce some form of distortion.
For added realism, Vue is able to replicate real-life lens distortions such as barreling and pin cushioning.

MentalRay and V-RayCompatibility

Vue 8 xStream is fully compatible with MentalRay's specific technologies, such as Sun&Sky, Photometric Lights, Distributed Bucket Rendering, etc.
Vue 8 xStream is fully compatible with V-Ray's specific Sun and Sky technologies.
Vue 8 xStream will automatically adjust it's settings to match the effects of these features, whenever they are used in 3ds Max, Maya or Softimage.

Rendering Flexibility

Vue 8 xStream lets you easily disable the rendering of the Vue sky and/or atmospheric effects (e.g. when using MentalRay or V-Ray Sun&Sky). You can even disable the rendering of Vue content altogether, for instance when performing tests on the host-application-part of the scene.
The interaction of Vue atmospheric effects with other volumetric plug-ins running in the host application is greatly improved.

Matching Scene Scales

Vue 8 xStream automatically matches it's unit system so that the sizing of Vue elements matches that of the host application. This ensures that a one foot-large cube in Vue also measures exactly one foot in the host application.
It is also possible to customize the scaling ratio between Vue and the host application.

Matching Lights

Render Times

Fast Stand-Alone Renderer

The Vue stand-alone renderer saves you a considerable amount of time by rendering images in the background while you continue working on the scene. This is a perfect solution for any single-computer work situation. Since the stand-alone renderer doesn't need to carry the overhead of a visual interface, it is able to dedicate more memory to the rendering.

Batch Rendering Interface

Render jobs can be easily batched from within Vue using the Batch Rendering interface.

Easy-To-Use Network Rendering

HyperVue™ and RenderCows

Vue provides distributed rendering over hybrid (PC/Mac) networks. Dispatching and managing render jobs is done via the HyperVue manager, which controls the RenderCow™ nodes.
Render nodes are automatically updated remotely, if required. In addition, e-on’s SmartCow™ technology lets you turn render nodes on and off while jobs are running.
Vue ships with 5 RenderCows. You can add more RenderCows if required by purchasing additional RenderCow packs from our online store.

Integrate with External Renderfarms

If you need to integrate Vue into a renderfarm that runs several different applications, you can take advantage of the optional stand-alone RenderNode.
The RenderNode is a command-line renderer designed to become part of larger renderfarm management tools such as, for instance, BackBurner.
>> Please click here for more information on network rendering with Vue

Compositing & Synchronization

Vue is designed to integrate seamlessly into the professional production pipeline. Great emphasis has been placed on creating a flexible and extensive toolset that lets you combine Vue’s natural scenery creation assets with other 3D and 2D applications.
Whether you do character animation or architectural visualization, compositing or post-processing, you’ll quickly discover how easily Vue can fit in!

Speed Up Your Workflow with Camera Mapping

Vue makes it easy to create camera mappings. Render an image, then project this image back through the camera onto a simplified version of your scene.
Camera mapping is ideal, for instance, to create animated matte paintings without having to carry the cost of rendering the animation with full geometry.

Composite any Scene Element with Multi-Pass Rendering

Vue provides extensive multi-pass rendering options. Virtually every rendering element, every layer, every material and every single object can be assigned a separate pass.
All masks (including the cloud mask and Ecosystem masks) are generated with color and corresponding opacity and are fully anti-aliased.
When the render is complete, you can immediately view and save each separate element directly from the render preview window, or save them all together as a multi-layer Photoshop file.
Supported multi-pass channels include:

Rendering components

Post process

Atmosphere gain

Atmosphere filter

Indirect lighting

Background

Reflections

Refractions

Ambient

Shadows

Specular

Diffuse

Extra components

Z depth

XY normal

XYZ normal

UVW coordinates

Diffuse lighting

Specular lighting

Material color

Object ID

Material ID

Global alpha mask

Individual masks

Layer masks

Object masks

Cloud mask

Material masks

Global Ecosystem masks

Multi-layer Photoshop export

Multi-Layer Photoshop Export

For ultimate workflow convenience, multi-pass renders can be exported as a Photoshop PSD file. Vue 8 will automatically create separate Photoshop layers for each rendering component, and create individual channels for the different masks.

Layer/Pass Identification

You can rename each individual render pass. This makes it a lot easier to locate a particular pass in the multitude of passes that can potentially be created.

G-Buffer Rendering

Industry standard G-buffer information can be generated and saved in RLA or RPF formats for compositing in dedicated applications such as Combustion, Avid, Flame and After Effects.
For increased compositing flexibility, the global or object-based "render occluded" option renders parts of the scene that are hidden behind opaque objects.

Supported G-buffer channels include:

Z depth

Material ID

Layer ID

UV coordinates

Normals

Non-clamped colors

Sub-pixel coverage

Render ID

Color

Transparency

Velocity

Sub-pixel weight

Sub-pixel mask

Get in Synch

Synchronization Plugins

Vue includes a set of synchronization plugins that enable perfect matching of camera motion and focal length, as well as lights, between major 3D applications and Vue.
The synchronization file generated by the 3D applications can be saved and retrieved later for use in Vue or moved to another system.
Vue synchronizes with the following 3D applications:

Autodesk Maya 5 and later
Autodesk 3DS Max 6 and later
Maxon Cinema 4D R8 and later
NewTek LightWave 8 and later
Autodesk Softimage 4.2 and later

Camera Tracking Import

Vue imports motion tracking information from MatchMover, Boujou and SynthEyes. Together with camera tracking information, you can also import the motion track points.

Animation

Vue can animate natural 3D environments like no other software. Create entire forests with millions of animated windswept trees, fly over infinite terrains with unlimited levels of detail, or fill the sky with elaborate volumetric clouds that realistically shift and transform.

Animating the Elements of Nature

In addition to standard animation of all objects and materials, Vue lets you animate a wide scope of environment-specific elements:

All atmospheric parameters (including all spectral atmosphere parameters)
All cloud parameters (standard and spectral), including movement, shift, wind direction and wind amplitude
Moon and planets (phase, brightness and other parameters)
Terrain erosion, decay and morphs
Vegetation growth, decay and reaction to wind
All wind parameters
Time-dependent natural procedural functions (waves, lava flows, etc)
Object-terrain interaction

The Powerful Animation Graph Editor

Free-Form Editing of Keyframes and Time Curves

The animation graph editor displays individual high-definition time curves for each animated parameter. Separate X, Y, Z curves are displayed for all transform values: position, size, twist and pivot as well as other parameters such as wind direction.
Freely move any keyframe, or group of keyframes, on both time and value axes. Each keyframe has its own handle, which can be easily manipulated to control tangents and interpolation.
Pan and zoom in the time curves window in order to display and edit any number of curves simultaneously. Use the precise numerical inputs to set time, value, velocity and acceleration for any key.
Conveniently use one of the preset interpolation types: smooth (constant and weighted), ease in/out, linear and step.

Dope-Sheet Style Keyframe Editing

The upper area of the animation editor lets you view all parameters in a collapsible spread sheet hierarchy, making it easy to move and copy keyframes on a global basis (for instance, move all transform keys at once, or copy/paste all keys at a certain frame).
This is also where you set animation start/end, and select timeline display units (seconds, frames or SMPTE).

Forward Dynamics

Linking and tracking is possible between all objects in the scene. Linking can be enabled separately for movement, rotation and size. Pivot points for all objects can be moved independently.

Loose Tracking and Linking

Vue features loose tracking and linking algorithms to give a more "natural" feel to your animations, by automatically introducing delays or overshoots.
While standard forward-dynamics produces precise motion, this motion may look unnatural and jolty, because the linking or tracking is much too "perfect".
You can easily customize the reactivity of the loose forward dynamics engine for each object, from standard (i.e. perfect reactivity) to slack responsiveness.

Animation Preview and OpenGL Rendering

Vue can generate quick previews of your animation, which are displayed in a resizable window at the bottom of the animation editor, and synched to the timeline navigation.
In addition, Vue can render the OpenGL camera view, giving you an ultra-fast way to generate full-sized animation preview clips.

Vue in the movies

Animate using Graph-Based Animation Scripts

Using the Scene-Graph approach, you can create complex, graph-based animation scripts to control the properties of your animated objects.
Access each object graph with a click of a button, then build a function to control the properties of the object and connect it to the desired output (e.g. position, orientation, size, etc).
Inside the function graph, you can access the properties of other objects in the scene and control your object based on the properties of other objects.

Loose Dynamic Nodes

Vue features a set of nodes dedicated to creating naturally flowing animations. This includes delay, integrator, differentiator, PID and constraint nodes.

Dynamic Interaction

You can even design scripts that will make objects interact dynamically with procedural terrains.
For instance, to recreate the deep impact effect of a meteor hitting a terrain you would simply control the altitude of the procedural terrain based on proximity to the incoming meteor.

Intelligent Motion with Dynamic Motion Reaction™

Vue offers an animation wizard that lets you create path animations with exceptional ease by automating most of the process.
Select the desired motion (pedestrian, airplane, motorbike, etc.), draw a path, and the wizard takes over by calculating the underlying terrain heights, adjusting banking and orientation, and adding secondary motion like spin and vibration.
You can fine tune all aspects of secondary motion and manually modify the resulting animation using all keyframe and time curve tools.

Pre-Animated Meshes and Poser Import

Vue can import pre-animated meshes, as well as complete animated Poser characters (including dynamic hair and cloth).

Re-Pose and Animate Rigged Meshes

Easier Pose/Motion Handling

The Motion Browser lets you visually select new poses or motions for your rigged meshes. The Motion Browser lets you interactively preview poses/motions on your rigged mesh, before applying them.
Typical poses/motions are also listed directly in the Skeleton Editor, to further facilitate the selection of poses for rigged meshes.

Industry Leading Wind Animation Capabilities

In Vue, wind can affect clouds, waves and, most notably, SolidGrowth plants and EcoSystems. Wind and breeze can be applied globally, per-plant, or by using one of the localized wind generators.

Global Wind and Breeze

Global wind is controlled from the atmosphere editor, and is applied to all SolidGrowth plants and EcoSystems within a scene.
Global wind adds a tremendous amount of realistic movement to natural scenery, ranging from delicate fluttering of leaves to strong bending in violent gusts.

Individual Per-Plant Wind

Each SolidGrowth plant (or group of plants) can have its own individual wind animation.
A wind arrow lets you interactively control wind direction and intensity, and view the plant’s reaction in real time.
The movement of the wind arrow can be animated, giving you the ability to create precisely timed wind effects.

Motion-Blur on Wind Deformation

Vue 8 can optionally render motion blur on the deformation of trees subject to wind. This is essential for perfectly smooth motion of wind-animated trees.

Directional and Omni Ventilators

These wind generators greatly enhance the ability to create localized wind effects that can be linked to the movement of other objects in the scene.

While the omni ventilator blows wind from a single point to all directions (just like a point light), the directional ventilator is limited by a spread cone (just like a spotlight).
Ventilators can affect single plants, groups of plants, or complete EcoSystems.
Both ventilator types can also be reversed to become "attractors". Ventilators can freely move around the scene, or be attached to other animated objects.
All of the wind generator's parameters can be animated as well, allowing for a wide scope of possible effects.

Optimize your Animation using Animation Rendering Options

Vue provides specific options for optimizing and speeding up animation rendering. In addition to the flicker-free SolidGrowth 4 rendering technology, you can enable deterministic anti-aliasing, multi-frame anti-aliasing and distance blurring.
Render broadcast material with even or odd field interlacing and non-square pixels, add customizable time-code frame markings, or kick-in the automatic illumination baking feature.
Animate post-render effects, synchronize cameras and lights to external applications, switch between cameras in a single shot, import motion tracking information and export camera motion for final compositing.

Materials

The creation of natural 3D environments requires highly complex shaders that respond to altitude or slope, seamlessly cover any terrain, and exhibit enough detail whether seen from distance or from close-up.
Vue features a shader system that is fully optimized for the challenges of Digital Nature. By using three types of material editors, you can effectively create anything from simple bitmapped textures to elaborate multi-layered procedural terrain materials that dynamically respond to the environment.

The Basic Material Editor

The basic editor is designed to let you quickly create bitmapped textures and easily customize existing procedural materials.
Its no-hassle interface offers slots for color, bump and alpha maps, as well as highlight and reflection sliders. You can also choose one of the eight mapping modes.

The Advanced Material Editor

This full-featured editor gives you control over every aspect of the material, from transparency fade-out color to displacement mapping, from variable reflections to translucency.

Mixed and Layered Materials

Vue’s material editor offers extended control over the creation of complex materials through a material mixing and layering system:

Add, delete, and rename layers on the fly
Move layers up and down in the stack
Each layer has its own alpha channel
Each layer has its own independent reaction to altitude, slope and orientation
Create mixed materials with any number of sub-materials
Easily navigate even the most complex layered/mixed/nested materials

Bump, Displacement and Normal Mapping

Vue offers bump, displacement and normal mapping channels for producing intricate surface details or large amplitude deformations (when using displacement).
The micro-polygon displacement engine is fully tailored for natural scenery creation allowing the render of millions of polygons with full level of detail optimization based on camera location and distance.
Displacement can be adjusted in any direction (vertical, horizontal, normal) and contains a smoothing slider to smooth out high frequency details if desired. Large amplitude displacement allows for extreme displacement effects without artifacts or torn meshes

Sub-Surface Scattering

Vue materials correctly implement the two aspects of sub-surface scattering: basic absorption (for highly translucent materials such as wax) and highly accurate multiple internal scattering (for slightly translucent materials such as marble).
The combination of these two aspects perfectly reproduces all the subtleties and unique “soft” look of all types of semi-absorbent materials.

Rotoscoping

Vue can use any image sequence, AVI or Quicktime animations as a texture map. These animated texture maps can be used in any texture channel, as light gels or as SmartGraph function nodes.

The SmartGraph Function Editor

Almost all the parameters in the material editor can be controlled by a function (or set of functions). The function editor is where the true power of material editing lies.
E-on developed the SmartGraph technology (inspired by artificial intelligence systems), to help overcome the sheer number of possibilities presented by the function editor. Thanks to this technology, connecting nodes and creating custom shaders is much easier and more intuitive.
There are hundreds of available nodes to choose from, ranging from numerous types of noises and procedural functions to mathematical nodes, mixers, combiners and filters.

Almost any node can be connected to any other, allowing the creation of highly elaborate materials or special shaders such X-ray, velvet, or cartoon. Reaction to the environment is further enhanced with nodes such as distance to object below or angle of incidence.

Time Dependent Nodes

Using time-dependent noise functions, you can animate not only materials but also procedural terrains. For instance, Vue 8 comes with a dedicated Open Ocean procedural function, which makes it easy to create rolling ocean waves with adjustable wind parameters.

Time dependent node

Controlling Materials from the "Outside"

With the "Scene Graph" approach of Vue 8, it is now possible to control internal material properties based on external parameters, such as the position of an object in the scene. This could be used to create a rim of foam around an object, or to color one object according to the orientation of another object...
With the “Relative to sea” option you can create materials that appear at certain altitudes, either relative to the sea, or absolute in world coordinates.

The input node, “Sea level”, is also directly accessible from the Function Graphs.
The External Dependency nodes of the Function Graph can express object positions and dimensions in user-definable real-world units (meters, feet, etc). This is also the case for other nodes that express real world dimensions, such as Distance to object below, distance from camera, etc.
Also, real world dimensions can be fed into the Position and Size outputs.

MetaNodes

MetaNodes let you group several nodes or links into a single node.

MetaNodes greatly simplify the readability of your graphs by letting you organize your graph into functional modules and then “publishing” the relevant internal parameters so that they are accessible in the Function Graph.
Vue ships with a library of preset MetaNodes to help you build your own graphs. You can complete this library by saving your own MetaNodes for future use.

Volumetric Materials

Vue offers advanced volumetric materials with 5 different lighting models to choose from (uniform, shaded, additive, volume shaded and HyperTexture).

Volume Shaded and HyperTextures Models

The volume shaded model supports internal volumetric color, accurate self-shadowing, and optional distance field.
The HyperTexture model effectively produces a solid/volumetric hybrid that can be used to create porous materials such as corroded metal or sponge, and various special effects like water splashes.

Interface & Workflow

The Vue design is based on the same paradigm that characterizes all of e-on’s products: a clean, uncluttered user interface, designed from the user's standpoint. All the power and control is there, hidden in deeper layers, easily reachable whenever you need it.
This combination of power and ease of use provides faster workflow, increased productivity, and a smoother transition from other applications.

Advanced OpenGL Engine

Vue's OpenGL preview engine maximizes efficiency on high-end GPUs as well as multi-core systems. It is built around a robust multi-threaded architecture which takes advantage of higher-end graphics cards to produce high visual quality and performance.

The OpenGL preview engine can operate in one of 3 modes:

Software: previews are generated by the CPU, maximizing compatibility with old video boards,
Fixed Pipeline Engine: previews are rendered using OpenGL 1.2 capable GPUs, and
Shader Engine: previews are rendered using advanced GPU shaders, producing the most accurate realtime representation.

Display Options

Display options include wireframe box, filled box, wireframe, flat shaded and smooth shaded.
These options can be set individually for each object, and for each display window. Fog, scene lights, shadows and video frame guides can also be enabled for Open GL display.

Dynamic Plant Display Optimization

The quality of plant previews is dynamically adjusted on a global basis, to automatically take into account the number and complexity of plants displayed, as well as user settings such as desired frame rate.
The engine displays the plants as detailed as possible, within the limits allowed by your settings in the Display Options panel.

OpenGL Sky Preview with Clouds

Sky previews use a progressive refinement method to provide an increasingly detailed view of the sky and clouds (for optimal response, this preview is computed on multiple CPUs). Cloud previewing can also be disabled if desired.

Realistic MetaCloud Preview

MetaClouds are displayed as a series of shaded particles which represent the final aspect of the MetaClouds.

Realistic Sun Shadows

The sun casts realistic shadows in the OpenGL views. This way, you get instant feedback on the shadows that will be cast by the sun in the final render.

Colored EcoSystem Billboards

Changes made to EcoSystem instance colors are displayed in the Vue OpenGL viewports. This way, you immediately get a better idea of what the final render will look like.
Shaded billboards can efficiently display large numbers of EcoSystem instances with optimal visual quality.

Realtime OpenGL Display

Realtime OpenGL Display

Customize Vue using Python Scripting

Vue features an extensible architecture that can be programmed using the Python cross-platform standard for application scripting.
Through Python scripting, you can access hundreds of internal structures and functions to customize and automate tasks or create entirely new rendering effects, EcoSystem functions, animation scripts, and custom-built loaders/exporters for your in-house file formats.

Sample Scripts

Vue includes dozens of sample scripts that add new functionality and illustrate some of the potential of python scripts. All are copiously documented and can serve as a starting base for your custom scripts.

Playback Repetitive Tasks with Macro Automation

Macros easily automate repetitive tasks by recording the actual user interaction dialog and saving it as an xml file.
Press the Record Macro button to start recording a set of operations, and save it to disk as a macro. Press the Play Macro button to playback any pre-recorded macros.
Setup frequently used macros for easy launch using the Macro QuickLaunch dialog. Using this dialog, you can easily assign shortcuts to those macros you use most.

Inviting, Easy-to-Use Interface

Multi-Threaded Interface

The Vue interface is fully multi threaded, so time-consuming processes run in the background without slowing you down, even when working on very large projects.

Viewport Display Options

Toggle between four windows and single window with one click. Toggle between normal and expert (full screen) modes. Freely resize or re-organize display windows in the four view mode. Resize the camera preview and the world browser. Dock/float the timeline, hide or reveal various interface elements on the fly.

Perspective View

The perspective view lets you pan, rotate and zoom independent of the camera view. You can use the camera controls for the perspective view as well.

Background Image

You can place a background reference image in any of the orthogonal display windows.

Units and Conventions

Vue can display all measurements in real-world metric or imperial units. Grid snapping can be enabled on the fly when moving or rotating objects. The grid resolution and rotation snapping values are user-defined.
You can also set the value of internal Vue units to adjust the scaling of the entire scene and choose to have either Y or Z as the up axis.

Interface Colors

You can individually modify the colors of 37 different types of interface elements, so you can set up the work environment you feel most comfortable in.
To make you feel at home more rapidly, you can use one of the many presets that replicate the color schemes of your favorite applications. You can also use the old style of interface, if you prefer.

Visual Browsers

Visual Browsers let you organize your content folders in collections. Items inside the collections are displayed with a small preview and description.

Time-Saving Tools and Helpers

Multi-Materials

Drop and SmartDrop Tools

While the standard drop function simply drops an object onto the surface below it, the SmartDrop tool attempts to place the dropped object in a natural way. For example, a box dropped onto a sloping terrain will be tilted so that it follows the slope.

The Interactive Alignment Tool

With this handy tool you can interactively align objects on either one, two or three axes simultaneously, while previewing the results in the display windows.

The Quick Array Tool

This powerful tool lets you create multiple duplicates of an object by interactively transforming a single copy. All subsequent instances will automatically inherit the transforms in either extrapolated or interpolated modes.

The Scatter/Replicate Tool

Use this tool to quickly generate multiple instances of an object, with precise control over distance, size and rotation, or to randomly scatter instances over a specified area with user-defined size and orientation variations.

The Quick Color Selection Tool

Click and hold the mouse button to instantly select a desired color. Use the preset color swatches to easily save and re-use your most used colors.

Import & Export

Vue provides maximum exchange compatibility with other applications, using an extensive set of import/export filters for both 3D and 2D content.
Vue also lets you export any native element such as trees, terrains, skies, and even complete scenes, to other 3D applications, using dedicated polygon reduction and UV unwrapping tools.

Intelligent Import Filters

Import 3D content from almost any program. Vue’s advanced import filters will retain accurate texturing and mapping information so that your models can be readily used.
You can choose to automatically simplify the geometry of imported meshes to quickly setup scenes involving complex models, then instantly switch back to full mesh resolution for final rendering.
2D content can be imported in a variety of formats, including High Dynamic Range (HDR) images.

Auto-Sense Dynamic Import Update

Imported objects and materials can be dynamically updated. If you modify an object in another application, Vue will automatically update that object in the scene.

Max Animated Mesh Import

Vue contains special import plugins for 3ds Max that convert static and animated objects created in this program into native Vue objects, and creates motion files that can be applied to other characters.

Vector Data Import

Postscript, encapsulated postscript and Adobe Illustrator data can be imported to be used as base shapes in the 3D text editor.

Collada File Import

Vue supports the open-standard Collada file format and is able to import Collada objects with full texturing information as well as rigging and animation.

Extensive Object and Scene Export

Vue lets you export content to other 3D applications in a wide variety of industry standard file formats such as Discreet 3DS, Wavefront OBJ, LightWave LWO, Cinema 4D C4D, and AutoCAD DXF.
Export rocks, terrains, plants, skies, or even entire scenes (Note: EcoSystems cannot be exported). Complex geometries are automatically unwrapped with minimum distortion and exported complete with all UV mapping and texturing information. You can adjust the level of detail of for both geometry and texture maps.
Skies can be exported as skydomes or skycubes. Exported skies can include illumination data in HDR image format.
Basic object animation information (motion, scale and orientation) can be exported as 3DS or LightWave MOT/LWS.
Custom import/export filters can also be created with Python scripting.

Still Images and Animation Export

Rendered images can be saved in all major graphic formats, including HDR and 48 bit color images. In addition to all standard video formats, animations can be exported in After Effects file format for a smooth transition to the compositing phase.

Atmosphere exported as a cubic map

3D Import Filters

3DS: 3D Studio™ object file format, Conversion of Max animated objects to Vue format (using the included plugins)

3DMF: 3D Metafile object file format.

COB: TrueSpace™ object file format.

DAE: Collada animated object file format.

DEM: USGS Digital Elevation Model. Terrains are placed according to information in the file (ideal for importing multi-part DEMs).

DXF: AutoCad™ object file format.

LWO, LWO2: LightWave™ object file format.

OBJ: Wavefront™ object file format (with automatic MTL library conversion).

PZ3, PZZ: Smith Micro™ Poser® static/animated scene import (requires Poser 4, 5, 6, 7 or Pro).

RAW: Raw geometry file format.

SHD: Shade™ 6 object file format.

SKP: SketchUp™ object file format (up to v7, Win32 only).

TGA: 16 bit RG encoded Targa altitude map.

WML: VRML object file format.

3D Export Filters

3DS: 3D Studio™ object file format.

C4D: Cinema 4D™ object file format.

COB: TrueSpace™ object file format.

DXF: AutoCad™ object file format.

LWO, MOT, LWS: LightWave™ file formats.

OBJ: Wavefront™ object file format.

SHD: Shade™ object file format.

Note: entire scenes can be exported as 3DS or LightWave LWS files only. Object animation
information (motion, scale and orientation) can be exported as 3DS or LightWave MOT/LWS files.

2D Import/Export Filters

BMP: standard Windows bitmap, uncompressed.

EXR: 32 bit floating point EXR image format

PICT: standard Macintosh picture file format.

JPG: Jpeg compressed picture file format.

TGA: Targa picture file format.

TIFF: Tagged Image File Format.

GIF: Compuserve GIF color mapped bitmap.

BUM: Poser bump map.

DEM: USGS/SDTS Digital Elevation Model.

IFF: Image File Format.

PCX: PCX picture file format.

PNG: Portable Network Graphics file format.

PSD: Photoshop Image File Format (Multi-layer PSD when used for multi-pass renders).

QTVR: QuickTime VR panorama.

RLA: Run Length encoded version file format (stores partial G-Buffer information).

RPF: Rich Pixel Format file format (stores all G-Buffer information).

HDR: High Dynamic Range image format.

OpenEXR: ILM's high dynamic range format.

EPX: Piranesi EPix file format.

VIM: Vue image file format.

Vue skies can be exported as HDR sky-spheres or sky-cubes for use in other applications.

Vector data import

PS: Postscript.

EPS: Encapsulated Postscript.

AI: Adobe Illustrator 3.2

Animation Export Filters

MOV: QuickTime movie format. (Note: Not supported by Windows 64 bit Editions)

AVI: Audio Video Interleaved animation format.

MA: Camera animation export (e.g. to After Effects).

Mpeg1: moving picture expert group, Ver.1 animation format.

Mpeg2: moving picture expert group, Ver.2 animation format.

Independent Frame animation in all supported picture file formats.

Animated Texture Map Import Filters

MOV: QuickTime movie format (Macintosh only).

AVI: Audio Video Interleaved animation format (Windows only).

Feature List

Following is the complete feature list of Vue 8 xStream. "NEW!" indicates a new feature based on a comparison with Vue 7 xStream.

Lighting

Global Illumination.
Global Radiosity.
Fast in-depth computation of reciprocal object lighting for accurate indoor lighting.
Radiosity engine optimized for: Indoor or infinite scenery.
Global ambiance.
Ambient occlusion with user definable occlusion range.
HDRI support.
Image based lighting.
Background and environment mapping.
Sub-Surface Scattering: Absorption.
Sub-Surface Scattering: Multiple Internal Scattering.
Easy GI single slider Global Illumination render quality setting.
Illumination baking.
Illumination baking quality adjustable on a global or per object basis (adjustable map resolution and quality boost).
Adjustment of Global light intensity.
Indirect lighting can be ignored on specific objects.
Influence of specific lights can be ignored from the Radiosity solution.
Advanced control over the indirect lighting engine.
Show illumination samples in final render.
Separate map option for background, IBL and global reflection map channels.
Shadow and volumetric light optimization for dramatic increase in rendering speed.
Light gels with realistic projection modes.
Adjustable light shadow density, negative lights.
Enable diffuse and highlight on a per-light basis.
Custom light intensity vs. distance profiles.
Lights can affect specific objects only.
Variable light color based on distance to light.
Area light panel for soft, natural lighting.
Light emitting objects.
One-click conversion of objects into light sources.
Fast, fake caustics in the shadows of transparent materials. Caustics realistically depend on the Index of Refraction.
Accurate computation of caustics in the shadows of transparent objects.
Realistic optional "spreading" of the light spectrum in caustics (rainbow-prism effect).
Per-light adjustment of the quality of soft shadows.
Complete lens flare system.
Controllable lens flares per light.
Lens flare editor.
Lens flare reflections editor.
Polygonal reflections.
Point light, Quadratic point light, Spotlight, Quadratic spotlight, Directional light.
Lens Glare effect simulates internal lens diffusion.
Automatic synchronization of light position, color, orientation and intensity between Vue and host application.
Use host application tools to adjust lights of Vue environment.
Automatic synchronization of all types of lights, including area lights.
Perfect blending of your 3D objects with Vue environment when rendering GI.
Lights can be disabled with a single click.

Atmosphere

Atmosphere presets: Over 160.
Ultra-realistic spectral atmosphere model.
Choice of 4 different types of atmosphere models.
Volumetric clouds, lights, materials (visible rays, with optional dust).
Spectral Volume Cloud layers for extremely realistic cloudscapes.
NEW! Extremely detailed Spectral 3 cloud system (for cloud layers and MetaClouds).
NEW! Realistic cloud shadowing on objects as well as internal shadowing.
NEW! Automatic detail refining for very close-up clouds.
NEW! Cloud anisotropy setting for advanced control of internal light scattering.
Fast indirect lighting in Spectral and Spectral 2 clouds.
NEW! Create spherical cloud layers at the surface of your planets.
NEW! Import real-world cloud density data to recreate existing cloudscapes.
NEW! Add tornadoes using your favorite paint tool.
God rays in clouds.
Fly through clouds.
Cloud layers near ground simulate fog.
Realistic "peaking" of mountains through clouds.
Create multiple layers of overlapping clouds.
NEW! Efficient model for cross-shadowing of objects on clouds.
MetaClouds individual cloud formations.
Library of MetaCloud models.
Predefined cloud shapes: Over 140.
Unlimited cloud layers.
Customize the shape of MetaClouds.
Stars, rainbows, ice rings.
Individual lights can illuminate spectral cloud layers and MetaClouds.
Edit the Vue atmosphere directly from the interface of the host application.
Render host application scenes inside Vue atmospheres – including spectral atmospheres.

EcoSystems

EcoSystem patented technology to easily distribute millions of objects in scenes.
Use preset EcoSystem materials to automatically populate your scenes with millions of objects.
Create EcoSystems from multiple objects.
Create entire forests of trees.
Create forests of trees blowing in the wind.
Scatter millions of animated objects.
Mix EcoSystems with standard materials.
Mix several EcoSystems together depending on environment (slope, altitude.
Automatic placement of EcoSystem population according to a user defined SmartGraph density function (that can depend on position, altitude, slope.
Advanced coloring control to vary the colors of the population over the EcoSystem.
Accurate control over the orientation of the EcoSystem population.
Accurate control over the size and variation in size of the EcoSystem population.
Automatic decay of EcoSystem density near foreign objects.
Optional size reduction and color decay at low EcoSystem densities.
EcoSystem 2 technology: paint instances directly onto objects.
Add, remove and resize EcoSystem instances interactively.
Select individual instances or groups of instances and move/rotate/resize them interactively.
Paint size, color or density of EcoSystems using a pressure sensitive tablet.
Convert EcoSystem instances to real objects for editing, move them back to the EcoSystem later.
Paint EcoSystems as individual material layers or on a global basis.
Layered EcoSystems to control individual EcoSystem populations.
Control "affinity" between EcoSystem layers.
View EcoSystem instances directly inside the host application viewports: Billboards, bounding boxes or full geometry.
Paint EcoSystems from all sides, in any view.
EcoSystem 3 Technology dynamically populates EcoSystems for potentially unlimited populations.
Dynamic EcoSystem 3 density adjustments for improved control of density on slopes.
NEW! Multi-processor EcoSystem population.

Vegetation

NEW! Ultra-realistic SolidGrowth vegetation: 170+ species.
Compatible with modified plant species.
Easy-to-Use Plant Editor for plant customization.
Instantly create variations of existing plants.
Plant Editor and Leaf Editor let you modify existing plants or create entirely new plant species.
Create and save new plant species as stand-alone files for future use in your scenes.
Support for new, extremely detailed plant species.

Terrains

Solid3D real-time terrain modeling.
NEW! Sculpt terrains in all directions.
NEW! Create overhangs and grottoes.
NEW! Sculpt, inflate, free form and smooth brushes.
NEW! User definable brush tip profile.
NEW! Automatic subdivision of terrain geometry when sculpting.
NEW! Adaptive subdivision adds polygons only where needed.
NEW! Edit terrains in context (view entire scene in editor).
NEW! Option to view terrain clipping planes in editor.
NEW! Option to display the terrain with a shiny surface to enhance details.
NEW! Constrain painting and effects to clipping zone.
NEW! Option to display the terrain in wireframe mode to view polygons.
NEW! Create edition "zones" to modify procedural terrains locally.
NEW! Create nested "zones" to build massive detail where needed.
NEW! Paint material distributions at the surface of terrains.
NEW! Import, view and edit distribution maps in the Terrain Editor.
NEW! Terrain effects optionally affect material distribution map.
Preset terrain styles: 8.
NEW! Erosion types: 9.
Geological algorithms: 12.
Glaciation, alluvium and dissolve erosion effects.
High definition data in standard terrains.
Procedural terrains with infinite details.
NEW! Infinite procedural terrains.
NEW! Planetary terrain rendering.
NEW! Flat, spherical and planetary procedural terrains.
NEW! Switch between flat, spherical and planetary terrains (geometry may be affected).
Combine image data with procedural functions using dedicated blending nodes.
Ability to switch from one form of terrain to another easily.
Skin terrains.
Symmetrical terrains.
Pressure-sensitive tablet editing of terrains.
NEW! Reset 2D and 3D painting independently: With 8,4 update.
Customizable brush shape for terrain editing.
Control distribution of materials on terrains from within the procedural terrain altitude function.
Control procedural terrain altitudes based on relationships with other objects.
The altitude of procedural terrains can be dynamically affected by other objects.
Realistic procedural terrains thanks to new dedicated natural effects noise nodes.
Infinite and local procedural terrain style presets to easily create each-time-different terrains of the given style.
Library of procedural terrain presets with associated materials.
Create your own procedural terrain style presets.
Efficient displacement mapping of infinitely detailed procedural terrains.
Procedural terrain preview in function editor.
NEW! Multi-processor procedural terrain construction: In standalone mode.
NEW! Stratified terrains thanks to the recursive strata filters.

Modeling

Primitive and Boolean modeling.
3D Text edition tool.
Customizable text beveling, extrusion... and material effects.
Import Postscript and Illustrator data into the text editor.
Optimized memory management for handling large polygon meshes.
True Metablobs organic modeling from all Vue Boolean primitives.
Adjustable Metablob envelopes and contribution.
Welding of multiple meshes into a single mesh.
Random rock generator.
Multiple planets (moon and other planets of the solar system).
Create billboards that always face the camera (with a 'force vertical' option).

Rendering

New radiosity algorithms that dramatically reduce low frequency blotches.
Generate high-quality indoor and outdoor renders.
Bucket rendering for lower memory requirements and improved spatial coherence when rendering.
Indirect lighting calculation can be easily re-used between "tweak" renders.
Option to update the Indirect lighting "on demand" only.
One-click displacement mapping.
Dynamic render-time displacement to handle extremely large "displaced" polygon counts.
Optional dynamic geometry smoothing to avoid sharp polygonal edges.
Automatic camera exposure option compensates for the strong variations in illumination between noon and sunset.
Natural film response.
Post-render exposure control.
Use an image or animation as a backdrop for your renders.
Rendering Presets: OpenGL, preview, final, broadcast, superior, ultra, user settings.
Render size limitation: Limited by memory only.
Pictures larger than screen resolution can be rendered to screen.
Custom render size.
Navigation inside the rendered picture using pan controls.
Alpha and Z depth directly computed during the render process.
Ray-traced depth of field.
Realistic Hybrid 2.5D depth of field.
Ray-traced [soft] shadows.
Advanced soft shadow computation to produce perfectly smooth soft shadows.
Ray-traced [blurry] reflections and refractions.
Blurry reflection and refraction settings for each material independently.
Fake [blurry] reflections using reflection maps.
AccuShadows shadow mapping technology for faster [soft] shadows.
Multi pass rendering (separates renders into the different rendering components - shadow, diffuse, ambient, etc.
Create separate pictures for Diffuse, Specular, Shadows, Ambient, Refractions, Reflections, Background, Indirect Lighting, Post-process.
Per layer, per object or per material multi-pass masks (fully anti-aliased): Color and alpha.
NEW! Create a separate color and alpha mask of clouds.
NEW! Generate color and alpha masks for Global EcoSystem instances.
Create layers for additional render information such as Z depth, object ID, material ID, global alpha mask, normal vectors.
Export all channels and masks into a convenient Photoshop PSD multi-channel, multi-mask file.
Full support of G-Buffer compositing information.
Store all anti-aliasing and rendering channel samples on separate G-Buffer layers.
Render occluded objects (on a per object or global basis) to render hidden parts of the scene.
Render export as RLA or RPF for advanced compositing options.
Exclude ground from Alpha map option.
Objects can be easily hidden from render.
NEW! Hide objects from render and disable lights by clicking their icon in World Browser: Optional.
Global and per-material reflection maps.
Rendering in unlimited color depth.
Optional details in render information panel.
Panoramic rendering with adjustable rotation angle.
Spherical panoramic rendering.
NEW! Multi-processor panoramic rendering: In standalone mode.
Rendering in all views (including orthogonal rendering).
Render in views can be set to a different quality than normal rendering.
Stand alone renderer handles rendering while you work on the scene.
Network rendering of animations.
Network rendering of pictures.
Rendering across hybrid network of computers (OS X and Windows).
Fail-safe HyperVue network rendering.
Number of render nodes (RenderCow) licenses included in product: 5.
Maximum number of render nodes: Unlimited (through RenderCow pack expansions).
SmartCow automatic node detection and activation.
Hotplug render nodes to add/remove nodes during render: MacOS X and Windows.
NewCow automatic updating of render nodes.
Customizable command-line render launching sequence.
RenderNode optional stand alone renderer for integration in large render farms.
Render area can be temporarily disabled.
NEW! You can lock the render area to avoid accidental modifications: With 8,4 update.
Render blow-up option.
Geometry anti-aliasing.
User definable geometry anti-aliasing: Up to 1024 rays/pixel.
HyperMipMap material anti-aliasing (including procedural materials).
User definable anti-aliasing strategies to optimize speed vs. Smoothness.
Improved anti-aliasing strategies produce much smoother results.
Optimized render memory management to allow the rendering of very large images.
Post processing to adjust color, contrast, saturation, gamma.
Ability to load/save independent post-processing settings.
Create custom render effects using user-defined python callbacks.
Ability to resume an interrupted render.
Control the rendering of Vue environments using the render settings of your 3D application.
Render Vue content inside your 3D application.
Render millions of EcoSystem plants or objects directly inside your 3D application.
Perfect blending of the objects of your 3D application with the Vue environment.
Mutual shadow casting of Vue objects on the objects of your 3D application, and vice-versa.
Vue objects reflect the objects of your 3D application, and vice-versa.
Perfect handling of transparency and refraction for the objects of your 3D application and Vue objects.
NEW! Rendering compatible with V-Ray: 3ds max and Maya.
Rendering compatible with MentalRay standalone render nodes.
Rendering compatible with MentalRay Distributed Bucket Rendering.
Generate detailed network rendering logs.
Real-life camera aberrations (cushioning and barreling).
Abort rendering on mouse-click in render area: Optional.
Render in all compatible renderers with a single license.
Option to disable the rendering of Vue sky and/or atmosphere (e.g. when using mr Sun&Sky).
Option to easily include/remove the Vue scene from a host application render.
Render Vue atmosphere and elements alongside other host application volumetric plug-ins.
Compatible with mr Daylight, mr Sun&Sky and mr Photographic Exposure.
NEW! Compatible with V-Ray Sun and Sky.
NEW! Easy-to-use camera mapping for retro projection of renders onto simplified geometry.
NEW! The total amount of RAM allocated to displacement mapping is adjustable.
NEW! Images can be saved to disk at regular (user definable) intervals during render.
NEW! Dual destination render option (e.g. display to screen while rendering to disk).
NEW! Generate detailed log files during network rendering.
NEW! Host application render settings can be automatically adjusted to match those of Vue.
NEW! Render displacement on arbitrarily large terrains: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Improved rendering of indirect lighting in preview mode: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Automatic adjustment of render buckets to optimize rendering of small images on multi-core systems: With 8,4 update.

Materials

NEW! Material presets: Over 550.
Level(s) of material Edition: 4.
Basic material editor with possibility of importing images as textures and bump maps.
Advanced procedural material creation/mixing.
Advanced Material Editor.
SmartGraph function Editor.
Control all material parameters via function graphs.
Advanced SmartGraph input nodes: screen position, angle of incidence, distance to camera, distance on ray, depth in object, distance to object below, incident light angle, light direction, light color, reflected direction, etc.
Time dependent noises (including animated 'Open Ocean' water node).
Browse material hierarchy inside material editor, with direct access to sub-materials and layers.
Layered material system.
Add names and comments to SmartGraph nodes.
Individual access to identical material zones.
Change material settings for several materials simultaneously.
Stack layers according to alpha, slope, altitude and orientation.
Alpha (non refractive) transparency channel.
Color and alpha map editor.
Rendering of Poser characters using the Poser shading tree: In standalone mode.
Perfect blending of lighting and GI with Poser shading tree: In standalone mode.
Optional texture mip-mapping.
Global control over the level of mip-mapping.
16 bit texture support.
Materials can be mixed seamlessly.
Mixed material can be set to react to environment properties (slope, altitude and orientation.
Material mapping modes (World and Object mapping): standard, cylindrical, spherical, parametric .
Easy access to all materials in scene.
Direct access to all materials inside multi-material objects.
Direct access to all texture maps and imported objects.
Rotoscoping (Use animations as texture maps).
Detailed function output observer.
Detailed node previews in function editor.
Baking of procedural materials as texture maps.
Adjustable maximum ray depth and Total Internal Reflections.
Anti-aliasing can be disabled for given materials.
Receive shadows material option.
Shadow only material option.
Backlight option (for one-sided materials only) for realistic backlighting of opaque materials.
Mixed/Layered materials displayed as hierarchies in World Browser.
Volumetric materials.
Volumetric materials with internal volumetric color and shading.
Hypertextures.
Luminous and Glowing materials.
Easy highlighting of sub-materials and layers to visualize the influence of each material in the final render.
Ability to map textures only once, controllable independently for each axis.
Vue procedural materials and EcoSystems render perfectly inside your 3D application.
Control materials based on the properties of other objects.
Highly realistic natural material effects thanks to dedicated noise and coloring nodes.
Easily control bump or displacement amplitude based on slope.
Option to re-evaluate contribution of materials based on displaced surfaces.
"Foam" output in Open Ocean node to easily control the distribution of foam on water surfaces.
NEW! Separate bump and displacement channels.
NEW! Constrained displacement (horizontal, vertical, etc).
NEW! Ability to control the direction of displacement through the material graph.
NEW! Displacement smoothing to eliminate noisy displacement artifacts.
NEW! Normal mapping.
NEW! Recursive strata and constrained strata filters for stratified effects.
NEW! Direct access to the alpha channel in the Advanced Material editor.
NEW! Per material texture anti-aliasing quality boost.
NEW! Per material simplification of sub-ray effect calculation.
NEW! Planetary mapping node with ability to set location of origin (latitude and longitude).
NEW! Material mapping can be absolute, relative to sea, by object or by material: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Sea level input node in graphs: With 8,4 update.
NEW! External dependency inputs can provide dimensions in real-world units: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Multi-materials let you change all the materials of an object in one single operation: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Drag-drop and copy-paste multi-materials between objects: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Move groups of keypoints in the color map and filter editors: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Invert entire color maps or filters: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Copy paste keypoints in color maps or filters: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Control the hue, saturation and brightness of entire color maps or groups of keypoints: With 8,4 update.

Animation

Animation output resolution: Limited by memory only.
Camera animation.
Animate objects, materials, atmospheres, clouds, waves.
Import animated Poser characters: In standalone mode.
Intuitive Animation wizard for easy animation setup.
OpenGL rendering of animations for quick proofing.
Dynamic Motion Reaction™ easy secondary movement setup.
Option to ignore time spline when computing motion (e.g. to look forward even when moving back).
Customizable Dynamic Motion Reaction effects.
Easy setup of cloud movement using direction and speed of movement controls.
Rigged Mesh support.
Animated post-processing effects.
Camera switcher lets you switch cameras during render (ideal for storyboarding).
Spin and vibration effects.
Twinkling stars.
Automatic synchronization of cameras and lights: With 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Maya, LightWave & Softimage XSI.
Synchronization data incorporated into scene for easy retrieval.
Save synchronization data to file for manual loading into Vue.
Animation export as AfterEffects.
Import motion tracking information.
Dynamic Motion blur anti-aliasing reduction.
Timeline with animation preview.
Easily change the duration of an entire animation.
Allow clipping of time slider to animation duration.
Animation properties in the Timeline.
Spline time control.
Field interlacing, non-square pixels, flicker reduction.
Enhanced time spline editor.
Advanced flicker reduction options.
Indirect lighting evaluation mode that reduces pulsation effects.
Automatic keyframe creation.
Auto-keyframing can be disabled.
Copy-pasting of animation keyframes.
Keyframes can be created for single properties only.
Graph display of animated parameter values in Timeline.
Accurate control over tangents and tension of animated parameters curves.
High precision animation curve control.
Access to individual coordinates in animation graph.
Step, linear and smooth interpolation modes.
Automatic ease-in/ease-out keyframe option.
Animate rotation using quaternions or Euler angles.
Action safe and title safe frames and field grids (user configurable).
Motion-blur on animated mesh deformations.
Fast Hybrid 2.5D™ motion blur.
Accurate dithered motion blur.
Adjustable and animatable amount of motion blur.
Separate animation channel for camera exposure.
Automatic simulation of breeze on plants.
Strong wind effects defined on individual plants or groups of plants.
Advanced breeze customization with OpenGL preview.
Animated wind intensity and direction.
Omni and directional ventilators for local modifications of plants.
Ventilators can be made to influence EcoSystems.
Plant geometry key framing for spectacular animated life cycles.
Ability to mark objects as never becoming animated.
Object linking and tracking - forward dynamics.
"Scene graph" approach allows advanced relationships between objects.
Access and control object properties using SmartGraph.
NEW! Save and reload entire object graphs in a single file.
NEW! Object graphs can express dimensions in real-world units: With 8,4 update.
Loose forward dynamics for "real world" linking and tracking.
"PID" and "Delay" controllers in SmartGraph for improved realism in object interactions.
Option to output temporary images when network rendering an animation as independent frames.
Optional display of time code on frames (on a separate layer when rendering as multi-pass).
Automatically hide time code when rendering to final or better.
Option to disable or customize padding of frame files.
Time display as: SMPTE, frame #, time.
Optional automatic illumination baking of meshes.
Motion blur on tree deformation.
Separate animation range and render range.
Use the animation tools of your 3D application to move around the Vue environment.
NEW! EcoSystem populations can be made to evolve over time.
NEW! Create custom rigged mesh animations.

User Interface

Productive, uncluttered interface layout.
Flat interface design (with optional standard Vue 5-style interface).
Customizable interface colors.
Automatic adjustment of interface shortcuts and colors to mimic other 3D applications in your toolkit.
Re-posing of Poser meshes directly inside Vue: In standalone mode.
NEW! Direct re-posing of rigged meshes.
NEW! Support for mesh morphs.
NEW! Select and manipulate bones directly in views.
NEW! Manipulate bones numerically using the Skeleton editor.
NEW! Support for wired helpers.
NEW! Highly optimized mesh skinning for fast refresh during animation scrubbing.
Efficient memory management: multiple instances of identical objects are stored only once in memory.
Automatic object instantiation.
Interactive alignment tool.
Accurate alignment and drop operations.
Quick color selection tool with customizable color presets.
Custom previews can be used to represent saved items.
Perspective camera view.
Drag items (e.g. objects, materials...) into your scene from the non-modal browsers.
Unified light editor.
Place an image in the background of the OpenGL views for reference.
Change axis conventions.
Change order of rotations.
Change the size of the animation preview in the Timeline.
Merge scenes.
Repeat last operation to create an array (extend or subdivide).
Alt + move object creates a copy of the object.
Customizable view navigation shortcuts.
Gizmo object manipulators (optional).
Adjustable gizmo size.
NEW! Spherical abstraction gizmos.
NEW! Dynamic spherical terrain unwrapping allows easy object placement.
Local, global, camera and parent manipulation modes.
Multiple object renaming.
View option menu commands with optional shortcuts.
Gizmo option menu commands with optional shortcuts.
Animation option menu commands with optional shortcuts.
Quick Render option menu commands with optional shortcuts.
Fully multi-threaded interface for fast response.
One view/4 view layout.
Real-time scene preview.
World Browser scene management.
Organize objects in layers: Unlimited layers.
Enhanced World Browser with direct access to materials, texture maps and imported objects for efficient management of complex projects.
Display material hierarchies with direct access to sub-materials.
Easy replacement of textures throughout the entire scene.
Library tab in World Browser shows all objects used several times.
Easily modify all instances of a reference object using the Library tab.
Scatter-replicate tool.
Scatter replicate tool creates variations of plants, terrains, rocks.
Replication tool with configurable position/size/orientation offset.
Random scattering and replication of objects.
Automatic instantiation of scattered/replicated objects.
Summary of materials to quickly access all materials in the scene.
Resizable material summary.
Drop button to easily set objects on the surface of underlying objects.
Smart drop rests the dropped object on the surface of the underlying object.
Undo-Redo: Multiple undo-redo.
Ability to reorganize the view panes.
Resizable viewports.
Dockable Timeline.
Access to all G-Buffer channels and layers in interface.
NEW! Save individual G-Buffer channels directly from the interface.
Access to all render passes and masks.
Access to vertical and horizontal camera fields of view.
Trackball-type camera operations and advanced camera management grouped into Camera Control Center.
Each camera possesses a target object for easier aiming and setting of focus point.
Camera targets can be linked to other objects in the scene (e.g. to automatically keep that object in focus).
All cameras can appear on screen.
Camera group manager in World Browser.
Resizable World Browser and Scene Preview.
Sort objects by size, name or type.
Lock or hide entire layers.
Python scripting.
Run Cornucopia3D third party Python scripts.
Directly access frequently used scripts.
Python console for direct input of Python commands.
Python functions to add, modify and remove EcoSystem instances.
NEW! Python nodes that can execute Python code inside graphs, with user definable inputs and outputs.
Picture printing with user definable DPI resolution.
User-definable startup scene.
Real units for object sizes.
Display measurements as real-world units (metric or Imperial).
Coherent display of real-world units.
Set internal units to change the overall scale of scenes.
Centered or relative to opposite corner object resizing.
Mesh splitting by material.
Object decimation for faster scene setup.
Spotlight view through for accurate aiming (OpenGL only).
Full-screen mode.
List of default folders when searching for texture maps.
Option to recursively search for texture maps in texture folders.
Optional independent panning and zooming of views.
Non-modal object editors.
Objects can be locked or hidden individually in OpenGL views.
Baking of objects to polygons (including Boolean operations).
Incorporation of texture maps in scenes.
User-definable keyboard shortcuts.
"Only show active layer" preview option.
Object replacement by other objects.
When replacing plants, use the geometry of the replaced plants to generate the new plants.
Automatic detection and creation of new browser collections.
NEW! Ability to lock browser collections to avoid accidental modifications: With 8,4 update.
Cloud layers can be easily hidden/restored.
Linear and angular snapping grids when moving and rotating objects.
Customizable linear and angular grid snapping when moving and rotating objects.
Multiple scene file backup tool.
Macro recording and playback to automate repetitive tasks.
Easily access frequently used macros using Macro QuickLaunch dialog.
Easily access recently created macros.
Content files accessible from all system accounts.
Easily change the location of your content folder after installation.
Rename individual render passes (e.g. "Maple Tree 527" -> "Hero Tree").
Disable/bypass Visual Browsers completely (e.g. when browsing images).
Intelligent re-titling of files when saving under new filename.
Use preset MetaNodes to easily assemble elaborate SmartGraph graphs.
Group parts of SmartGraph graphs as MetaNodes.
"Publish" specific MetaNode parameters for easy access from the level above.
Build your own MetaNodes library of commonly used graph snippets.
Ability to fix the altitude of the camera above the ground.
Press "Ctrl" to slow down the controls in the Camera Control Center.
Dedicated water editor to easily create and adjust infinite water planes.
Go from still to stormy waters with a single slider.
Easily add true displacement to the water surface.
Customize the look of water surfaces using the new MetaWater materials.
Automatic scale matching between Vue and host application elements.
Vue interface fully integrated in the host application.
NEW! Vue commands accessible via icons in interface (Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Softimage).
NEW! Non-modal dialogs in host application.
Manipulate Vue elements using host application manipulators.
Animate Vue elements using host application tools (including scripting tools).
Create and edit Vue objects, plants, terrains, etc. directly from the host application.
Switch from host application to Vue standalone for editing Vue scene, then update Vue scene in host application when done.
View Vue elements in host application using OpenGL or Direct3D.
Have Vue elements interact with host application elements (e.g. add 3DS Max fur to a Vue terrain).
Simplified customization of integrated Vue xStream render quality settings.
NEW! Interactively paint EcoSystems on objects (including host application objects) using host application tools: 3DS Max, Cinema4D and Softimage XSI.
NEW! Optionally adjust lights in Vue and host application independently.
NEW! Automatic matching of shadow density between Vue and the host applications (Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Softimage).
NEW! Ability to adjust brightness of Vue radiosity to better match that of host application.
Run several instances of Vue simultaneously.
Support for 3Dconnexion tracking devices (SpaceNavigator, SpaceExplorer, etc).
NEW! Automatic renaming of Standalone- and HyperVue-generated frames if overwriting.
NEW! Automatic renaming of RenderNode-generated frames if overwriting.
NEW! Global EcoSystem visible as proxy object in World Browser: In standalone mode.
NEW! Select and delete Global EcoSystem instances with one click: In standalone mode.
NEW! Format specific options accessible through a special button in Save file box, and no longer prompted for each time.
NEW! Adjustable separator in Timeline to change width of animated items list.
NEW! Material preview option which displays materials mapped onto a small terrain object.
NEW! Name of atmosphere appears in Atmosphere editor caption.
NEW! Name of edited function appears in Function editor caption.
NEW! Access sea level directly through the xStream interface.
NEW! High fidelity procedural terrain previewing in host application.
NEW! Visual motion browser lets you select rig poses or animations visually: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Preview motions/poses before applying them: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Typical motions directly accessible from skeleton rig editor: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Default views are automatically adjusted according to internal units: With 8,4 update.

Real-Time Preview

High-speed OpenGL real-time preview engine: In standalone mode.
NEW! Choice of 3 OpenGL engines: shader based, fixed pipeline and software provide optimal quality/compatibility options: In standalone mode.
NEW! Shader-based OpenGL engine maximizes efficiency and visual accuracy on high-end GPUs: In standalone mode.
Completely threaded OpenGL architecture makes the best of multi-core systems: In standalone mode.
Fully customizable OpenGL previewing options: In standalone mode.
Realistic OpenGL preview of plants, planets, lens-flares, texture map atmosphere... with instant and detailed feedback: In standalone mode.
Dual-resolution OpenGL preview for faster response: In standalone mode.
NEW! Preview specular highlights in real time: In standalone mode.
OpenGL preview of EcoSystem instances as billboards, boxes or full geometry: In standalone mode.
NEW! Preview EcoSystem instances as shaded billboards: In standalone mode.
User definable radius around the camera in which EcoSystem instances appear at full resolution: In standalone mode.
NEW! Dynamically populated EcoSystems around the camera can be viewed in viewports: In standalone mode.
NEW! Control minimum size and maximum number of dynamic EcoSystem instances previewed: In standalone mode.
NEW! Dynamic filtering of EcoSystem shaded billboards to improve accuracy and reduce flickering in realtime preview: In standalone mode, with 8,4 update.
Textured OpenGL preview: In standalone mode.
OpenGL and Wireframe preview modes: In standalone mode.
OpenGL Preview of Boolean operations: In standalone mode.
OpenGL Preview of Metablobs: In standalone mode.
Threaded previewing of procedural terrains with dynamic LOD: In standalone mode.
Anti-aliased real-time OpenGL preview: In standalone mode.
Automatic selection of preview color based on procedural material color: In standalone mode.
Show objects as box, wireframe, shaded or smooth shaded: In standalone mode.
Axis preview in viewports: In standalone mode.
OpenGL and rendered plant preview in Plant Editor: In standalone mode.
NEW! Sky preview with clouds: In standalone mode.
NEW! Realistic MetaCloud preview: In standalone mode.
NEW! Realistic sun shadows: In standalone mode.
NEW! Colored EcoSystem instance preview: In standalone mode.
NEW! Dynamic plant display optimization: In standalone mode.
Decimated object preview for faster previewing: In standalone mode.
Minimum setting for preview frame rate (dynamic preview simplification to maintain frame rate): In standalone mode.
Control over OpenGL clipping planes: In standalone mode.
NEW! Selected objects appear with a red wireframe: In standalone mode.
NEW! Parts of selected objects that use the current material appear highlighted: In standalone mode.
NEW! Selection wireframe always appears on top of other objects that are in front: In standalone mode.
Selected objects are "ghosted" in red: In standalone mode.
NEW! Selection wireframe color is user definable: In standalone mode.
NEW! Highlighted material selection wireframe color is user definable: In standalone mode.
NEW! Bone highlight color is user definable: In standalone mode.
High quality texture and terrain previewing: In standalone mode.
View the Vue environment inside the viewports of your 3D application: In standalone mode.
NEW! Rendered images can be displayed in the background of all viewports: In standalone mode.
NEW! Camera mapping preview in real time preview: In standalone mode.
NEW! Planes are visible from all sides in the OpenGL views: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Accurate OpenGL display of materials in world coordinates: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Status bar can display poly count, free system resources, and used GPU resources: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Ability to hide all layers in the World Browser: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Ability to copy-paste objects into hidden or locked layers: With 8,4 update.
NEW! When deleting all objects from a layer, the layer is no longer deleted. You need to do this explicitly: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Easily restore default installation folders at install time: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Optimized Full Quality Near Camera option for faster high quality previewing: With 8,4 update.
NEW! Optimized handling of complex group hierarchies: With 8,4 update.

Import/Export

Static Poser scene import: In standalone mode.
Support for Poser dynamic clothes and hair: In standalone mode.
Animated Poser scene import: In standalone mode.
NEW! Support for Poser 8: In standalone mode.
Convert objects from Max into Vue format (requires 3DS Max).
NEW! Unrigged objects are now exported from Max as standard Vue meshes: With 8,4 update.
Compatible with Cornucopia3D cost-effective copy-protected content.
Cornucopia3D items are identified in the Visual Browsers using a small icon.
Cornucopia3D content display options in Visual Browsers: "All", "Best Selection" or "None".
Import options dialog to control imported object position and sizing.
When loading objects, option to automatically drop them to the ground.
Motion tracking import: MatchMover (RZML, RZ3), Boujou & SynthEyes (MS).
2D Import: BMP, BUM, DEM, EXR, GIF, HDR, IFF, Jpeg, PCX, Pict, PNG, PSD, RLA, RPF, TGA, TGD, Tiff, Vistapro DEM.
Animated 2D import: Sequence of pictures, MOV (Macintosh only), AVI (Windows only).
Vector data import: Postscript and Illustrator up to 3.2.
Exposure and contrast controls in HDRI images.
Textured model imports as: 3DS, 3DMF, COB, DAE, DEM, DXF, LWO, OBJ, PZ3, PZZ, RAW, SHD, SKP, VRML.
Textured and animated Collada file import.
NEW! Support for rigged Collada meshes.
NEW! Support for Sketchup 7 (Win 32 only).
2D Export: Tiff, TGA, Pict, BMP, GIF, EPX, PSD, Jpeg, PNG, PCX, IFF, RLA, RPF.
Export high dynamic range images (including skydomes).
Export 48 bit color images.
High Dynamic Range 2D Export: HDR, EXR.
NEW! 32 bit resolution, floating point EXR import and export.
Embed alpha information in Tiff and PNG formats.
Object export (with textures).
Optimized object and texture map exports.
Textured object export as: 3DS, C4D, COB, DXF, LWO, OBJ, SHD.
Scene export: 3DS, LWS.
Sky exports as sky-boxes or sky-domes.
Camera animation export (e.g. to After Effects): Maya MA.
Object animation export (motion, orientation, size): 3DS, MOT.
User-definable mesh and texture map resolution for exports.
Automatic re-importing of externally modified texture maps and 3D objects.
Objects can be marked as not being exportable.
Advanced unwrap algorithms for low-distortion UV mapping.
NEW! Optimized terrain exports: With 8,4 update.

System Resource Management

Robust threading architecture.
Texture virtualization allows rendering with extremely high resolution texture maps.
Geometry virtualization allows rendering of polygon-intensive objects.
"Purge Memory" command to cleanup memory and reduce fragmentation.
Automatic memory monitoring system attempts to preserve scene integrity after memory allocation failures.
Optional compatibility mode minimizes hardware compatibility issues.
Degraded display mode (dynamic simplification of OpenGL preview when resources become critically low).
Optional limit on OpenGL polygon count.
Automatic suspension of mesh simplification, Boolean/Metablob preview and background draw threads when system resources become critically low.
Automatic software updating (optional).
Video-board compatibility checking.
Automatic checking of OpenGL driver compatibility.
Option to clear OpenGL data before rendering.
Embedded error-reporting feature to help reduce time-to-fix.
NEW! User definable maximum video board memory usage.

Miscellaneous

Multi-processor rendering: Unlimited number of CPUs.
Hundreds of preset atmospheres, objects, materials.
NEW! Terrainscapes preset terrain material library.
NEW! Optimized for PowerPC and Intel Macs: Mac Intel only.
64 bit version optimized for Windows XP64 and Vista 64.
Floating licenses: With optional License Server.
Licenses can be used as floating licenses when installed in the optional License Server.
License Server can run as a service.
Automatic detection of License Server.
License valid for commercial use.
NEW! Sample scene showing a similar setup of a building in the different host applications.
Inline help: PDF Manual.
NEW! Documentation: 668 page manual.
NEW! Media: 1 Application CD + 1 Extras DVD.

Requirements & Pricing

Minimum System Requirements

Macintosh

Mac OS X v10.5 and 10.6,
2GHz Intel processor or faster,
1GB of free RAM,
200 MB of free Hard Disk space,
1024x768 in 65K colors/16 bits (24+ bits recommended).

Windows

Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 32/64,
2GHz Pentium IV or better processor,
1GB of free RAM,
200 MB of free Hard Disk space,
1024x768 in 65K colors/16 bits (24+ bits recommended).

An OpenGL accelerated video board is not required, but is a big plus.

Recommended System Specs

Windows 64 bit (XP, Vista or Windows 7), Mac OS X v10.6
Multi-core CPU (Intel QuadCore, Core I7, or Mac Pro),
4GB+ of RAM,
4GB+ of free Hard Disk space (on the drive hosting the OS),
An OpenGL accelerated video board (see below for optimal compatibility)

Supported Video Boards

The following boards will perform using the new Shader engine. Other boards may not perform using the Shader engine, but will perform using the older fixed-pipeline one. In any case, Vue can perform in software OpenGL regardless of the video boards.

Windows:

All boards with NVidia Quadro, GeForce8/9 and GT200 chips,
ATI FirePro V8000 series with up-to-date drivers (i.e. not on original CD)

Boards with ATI Radeon 4800 series with updated drivers will work, but can suffer small performance issues. New ATI 5800 series remain untested at this point.

Macintosh:

All boards with NVidia GeForce and GT200 chips,
All boards with ATI Radeon HD and 4800 series (10.5.6+ required).

Boards that are not on this list may work with Vue, but haven't been extensively tested. If you run into any OpenGL issues, try disabling background draw and antialiasing in the Options panel. Worst case scenario: you can always run Vue in software OpenGL mode.

Recommended chips:

Windows:

nVidia GT260/275/280.
nVidia QuadroFX 1800/3800 (5800 untested but should work fast and stable).
ATI FirePro V8000 series with up-to-date drivers (i.e. not on original CD).

Macintosh:

nVidia GT series.
ATI HD 2600 and 4000 series.

Not recommended:

Windows:

All ATI Radeon prior to 4000 series.
ATI 9000 series, X series, and HD series might work, but with fewer options, and you may experience severe slowdowns.
ATI FireGL 5000 series.

Macintosh:

Intel-based GPUs and nVidia 7300 board will not work with Vue (with hw acceleration).

Supported Applications

Windows

3DSMax (and 3DSMax Design)
- 32bit version: 3DSMax 7 to 2010*
- 64bit version: 3DSMax 9 to 2010*
Cinema 4D
- 32bit version: Cinema 4D R9.6 to R11.5
- 64bit version: Cinema 4D R9.6 to R11.5
LightWave 3D
- 32bit version: LightWave 3D 9.3 to 9.6
- 64bit version: LightWave 3D 9.3 to 9.6
Maya
- 32bit version: Maya 6 to 2010
- 64bit version: Maya 8 to 2010
Softimage|XSI
- 32bit version: XSI 5.1 to Softimage 2010
- 64bit version: XSI 5.1 to Softimage 2010
(*) If using 3ds Max 2009, SP1 is highly suggested.

Macintosh

Cinema 4D
- Universal Binary version (32bit*): Cinema 4D R10 to R11.5
LightWave 3D
- Universal Binary version (32bit*): LightWave 3D 9.3 to 9.6
Maya
- Universal Binary version (32bit*): Maya 8.5 to 2010 (2009 and 2010 is MacIntel only)
(*) If the host application supports 64bit, you need to launch it in 32bit mode to allow the loading of the xStream integration plug-in.

Known Issues

- potential crash when editing procedural terrain after conversion from standard mode.
- non refreshed procedural terrain settings after conversion from standard mode.
- broken procedural terrain zero edges button after conversion from standard mode.
- missing cloud material files "Planetary Cloud Base.mat" and "Planetary Clouds.mat" (see updates page for download link)
- missing cloud bitmap file "planet_clouds_8k.jpg" (see updates page for download link)
- potential memory leak when using subsurface scattering.
- potential corruption of scene materials when reusing stored materials within advanced material editor.
- invalid renders when using 100% translucency anisotropy amount.

Availability and Pricing

Vue 8 xStream is available in English.
Vue 8 xStream is optimized for Intel Macs only (32 bit), and for Windows XP/Vista/7 32 and 64 bit.

	US/Canada	Europe	UK	Others
Vue 8 xStream	US$1,495	1,250	£1,132	US$1,495
Vue 8 xStream	US$1,495	US$1,495	US$1,495	US$1,495
Vue 8 xStream + Standard Maintenance	US$1,790	1,496	£1,356	US$1,790
Vue 8 xStream + Standard Maintenance	US$1,790	US$1,790	US$1,790	US$1,790
Vue 8 xStream + Premium Maintenance	US$2,290	1,914	£1,734	US$2,290
Vue 8 xStream + Premium Maintenance	US$2,290	US$2,290	US$2,290	US$2,290

» Sidegrades From Vue 8 Infinite
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 8 infinite Sidegrade	US$645	539	£488	US$645
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 8 infinite Sidegrade	US$645	US$645	US$645	US$645
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 8 infinite Sidegrade + Standard Maintenance	US$940	785	£712	US$940
	US$940	US$940	US$940	US$940
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 8 infinite Sidegrade + Premium Maintenance	US$1,440	1,204	£1,090	US$1,440
	US$1,440	US$1,440	US$1,440	US$1,440

» Upgrades / Sidegrades From Vue 7
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x xStream Upgrade	US$495	413	£375	US$495
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x xStream Upgrade	US$495	US$495	US$495	US$495
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x xStream Upgrade + Standard Maintenance	US$790	660	£598	US$790
	US$790	US$790	US$790	US$790
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x xStream Upgrade + Premium Maintenance	US$1,290	1,078	£977	US$1,290
	US$1,290	US$1,290	US$1,290	US$1,290
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x infinite Sidegrade	US$895	748	£678	US$895
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x infinite Sidegrade	US$895	US$895	US$895	US$895
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x infinite Sidegrade + Standard Maintenance	US$1,190	994	£901	US$1,190
	US$1,190	US$1,190	US$1,190	US$1,190
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 7.x infinite Sidegrade + Premium Maintenance	US$1,690	1,413	£1,280	US$1,690
	US$1,690	US$1,690	US$1,690	US$1,690

» Upgrades / Sidegrades From Vue 6
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 xStream Sidegrade	US$745	622	£564	US$745
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 xStream Sidegrade	US$745	US$745	US$745	US$745
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 xStream Sidegrade + Standard Maintenance	US$1,040	869	£787	US$1,040
	US$1,040	US$1,040	US$1,040	US$1,040
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 xStream Sidegrade + Premium Maintenance	US$1,540	1,287	£1,166	US$1,540
	US$1,540	US$1,540	US$1,540	US$1,540
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 Infinite Sidegrade	US$1,345	1,124	£1,018	US$1,345
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 Infinite Sidegrade	US$1,345	US$1,345	US$1,345	US$1,345
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 Infinite Sidegrade + Standard Maintenance	US$1,640	1,371	£1,242	US$1,640
	US$1,640	US$1,640	US$1,640	US$1,640
Vue 8 xStream - Vue 6 Infinite Sidegrade + Premium Maintenance	US$2,140	1,789	£1,621	US$2,140
	US$2,140	US$2,140	US$2,140	US$2,140

» Network Rendering Licenses for Vue 8 xStream
Vue 8 xStream RenderNode License	US$149	US$149	US$149	US$149
Vue 8 xStream RenderNode License - Upgrade from Vue 7 xStream Rendernode	US$59	US$59	US$59	US$59
+5 Rendercow Pack for Vue 8 xStream	US$199	US$199	US$199	US$199
+25 Rendercow Pack for Vue 8 xStream	US$799	US$799	US$799	US$799

Buy Vue 8 xStream Now!

More Information

Press Releases

If you are a member of the press and need higher resolution material, further information, or anything else, please don't hesitate to contact our press department:

New Japanese Virus: A Cruel Punishment for Porn Lovers

2010-04-25T23:21:00.000-07:00

There is a new virus provided with the copy of Cross Days novel. When opened by a user, it gathers personal information, makes screen shots of the desktop and web history. The virus uploads all gathered information to a public site. To remove it a user needs to pay a fee.

Hackers got tired of traditional viruses that break the system down and have invented a new way of how to injure internet users. A new virus is intended to damage the reputation of porn lovers without prejudice to their computers. A new Trojan program called Kenzero is walking around “Winni” file-sharing service that is extremely popular in Japan. When user downloads a pornographic animated novel named Cross Days, it goes supplemented with Kenzero virus. Soon the whole world will know about his secret liking for such a spicy content.

Kenzero looks like a common installation program that asks user to specify his personal information like name, address, phone number, etc. While user carefully fills the installation form, Kenzero makes a few screen shots from user’s desktop, web history and recent file access. The whole data then is uploaded to a public website. After a little time an infected user receives an e-mail message saying that he has to make a payment of 1500 yen (£10) for removing the information from the website. This is a fee for violating the copyright law that protects unauthorized distribution of Cross Days.

“The websites those were privy to this scam have been banned and still don’t work. This was made to stop the spread of Kenzero. But there are about 5 500 users who were infected before the secure measures were assumed,” reports the representatives of Sankaku Complex anime portal. “It is still unknown how many people have paid for removing their personal information from the web, and whether that information was actually deleted”. The personal information gathered by a virus can be used in many ways, not only for one-time blackmail.

Kenzero has caused several scandals, revealing that erotic anime excites some sinless votaries of science and education. It became officially known that the Trojan has infected a head teacher of one middle school who tried to get Cross Days for his personal needs. The novel contains pornographic scenes with the underage schoolgirls. The fact that teacher likes to watch such scenes didn’t influence on his career and the teacher still holds his position.

Next Generation of Motion Controllers

2010-04-25T23:03:00.001-07:00

Microsoft is planning on giving a new approach to the world of gaming by scraping the controller and taking the human body as the basic thing to communicate with the console. The name of the work they are just about to finish is Project Natal. NATAL meaning “connected with one’s birth” as in birth of a new generation of games and controllers. As you can see even the name of this great invention is catchy and handy. The hardware itself will be just as natural as the name feels for it.

Ok, I’m guessing that all of you have heard or even seen the project called NATAL around the internet. It’s Microsoft’s answer to future gaming and the best experience that each one of us will enjoy very soon.

Now let’s go on a journey back in time to June 1, 2009. It was the day when Project Natal was first announced and it immediately drew attention of the media and gamers alike. The first few specs that Microsoft shared with the public were that the Project Natal is the Xbox 360 hardware add-on that will appeal on our senses and make gaming controller-less. That means that we will be able to use our entire body to play games the way we always wanted to.

Of course there were some different approaches on making gaming more fun and involving physically but many have failed, one of the best known and still played game controller is the dance pad which made birthday parties look cooler and malls a nicer place to spend some time. The arcade, PS One, PS2 and Xbox360 made a good run game after game making us move and enjoy the music with some awesome choreographies. Some of the other examples were Wii’s motion controller, Play Station 3’s 3 axis gamepad and the EyeToy that stayed marginal with the games that could be played, the game developers just couldn’t incorporate the technology into any game that could look cool. The newest addition to the motion capturing in games is Play Station 3s PS “move” controllers which look odd but for now they are the closest thing to the fun free moving game play.

The Project Natal hardware consists of 2 cameras tracking your every move with a few billion calculations a frame, 60 frames a second. I don’t need to emphasize the calculating and software power. The sensor actually consists of an infrared projector and a monochrome sensor that make the software detect any movement and recognize any shape that is given in front of it. The infrared sensor will make it possible to detect any movement in shady and less lightened rooms, so even if you wanna play in a dark room with flashing lights at a party at a friends’ house or at home on a nice Saturday morning after school or just as a fun way to get you thought off work, you will have the chance to do it without any preparations for the console to work. It will feature facial, imaging and voice recognition.

You will input commands only with your voice and gestures through a natural and slick user interface. The software that Microsoft provided will have the chance to map out even up to four skeletons, which means that four players can play at the same time in split-screen. And the good news for Xbox 360 users is that the console will extend it’s lifespan (life cycle) by 5 years, meaning 2015. I.e. every console has a normal life cycle of 5 years, if you take a look back at PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox you will see 5 years between generations of those platforms.

Also needs to be said that it will be sort of an update to the previously bought consoles so that gamers shouldn’t buy the whole package all over again. Till now the speculations show that it will cost around $300 in a bundle so as a stand-alone component it should be around $100.

Be sure to look for Project Natal on the shelves of gaming stores this Christmas.

VRay Advanced v1.5 for 3ds Max

2010-04-23T11:48:00.001-07:00

VRay Advanced for 3ds Max

Trust your visuals to the renderer of choice of the big production studios across the world. Use VRay to produce highly photo-realistic images.

VRay has become a benchmark for speed used by many hardware vendors and other renderer developers to test against. Richest set of features, cost-effective and production-ready.

Get the total package when you purchase from Trinity3D

A WIBU hardware key for licensing is shipped to you
An online account at ChaosGroup.com for downloads of the VRay installer
An online account at the VRay official forums (limited to VRay Advanced Owners) for discussion and support. This is an excellent resource for active users to solve problems.
Ability to download VRay for any version of 3ds max, 3ds VIZ, or 3ds max design from version 7 to current. Both 32 and 64 bit installers are available for max 9 to current.
Ability to run (simultaneously) VRay on any version of 3ds max from 7 to current on one workstation
Ability to render VRay on unlimited render slave machines (using 3ds max with backburner - call Trinity3D if you need help setting this up)
Ability to render VRay in "Distributed" mode where "spawner" on slave machines will contribute buckets to a primary machine. Up to 10 computers may contribute buckets (one bucket per core), this is a technical limitation from network traffic. Usually you will use BackBurner to render your stills and animations across multiple machines
Ability to float VRay on your network so that any one workstation can interact with VRay in max.
Documentation is online and updated with new versions
Tutorials are online
Current policy is for unlimited future updates of VRay Advanced. To date all updates of VRay Advanced have been free.
Installation and limited usage support from Trinity Animation.

*** Available for US, Mexico and Canada only. Other Nations must purchase from their local dealers, per request of Chaos Group (makers of VRay).

** All licenses are non-transferable once registered. Once having purchased the product, the end user will not be allowed to transfer or sell their rights to third parties.

VRay 1.50.SP 4a Now Available
As of December 21st 2009, the newest build, V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4a for 3ds Max®.

The V-Ray® 1.50 Service Pack 4a is compatible with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 9, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2008, 3ds Max® 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max Design 2009, Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010, Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010.

The new V-Ray build supports both 32-bit and 64-bit OS.

It includes the following modified features:
• Added support for projection mapping when doing texture baking;
• Added new option to link the V-Ray VFB to PDPlayer;
And several bug fixes:
• Turning off "Affect specular" for a dome light made it invisible to reflections as well;
• Fixed a crash when importing a particular .vrmesh file;
• Fixed crash with VRayFastSSS2 material with VRayDirt map and a standard light with VRayShadowMap;
• The "prepass samples" option in the motion blur rollout did not work;
• Fixed stuck buckets with VRayEnvironmentFog and mesh gizmos;
• Fixed issues with VRayEnvironmentFog and mesh gizmos with modifiers;
• User could not remove gizmos/lights from VRayEnvironmentFog;
• ParticleFlow instancing did not render all mapping channels of original mesh;
• Fixed crash with VFB region render when region is outside of image;
• Turned off by default the option to save the DR servers to the scene (caused slowdown on scene save if servers are offline);
• Fixed some licensing issues.
Core Architecture

Multi-platform object-oriented API
Fully multithreaded core
Unified sampling system based on Schlick sampling
Distributed rendering
Efficient shading system specifically optimized for ray-tracing
Modular architecture - many components of the system can be replaced with custom ones

Geometry

Efficient geometry handling
True instance rendering
On-demand dynamic geometry creation
On-demand geometry loading from disk files
Displacement mapping
Catmull-Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces
Extensible with custom geometric primitives through the V-Ray SDK

Image sampling

Three different image sampling methods
Full-scene anti-aliasing
Progressive path tracing
Support for additional render elements (diffuse, reflection, GI etc)
Advanced color (tone) mapping controls
Extensible with custom image samplers through the V-Ray SDK

Illumination

Physically accurate full global illumination solutions
Different GI algorithms: path tracing, irradiance cache, photon maps, light cache
Reusable GI solutions for accelerated rendering of walk-through animations and animations with dynamic objects
Physically accurate area lights
Efficient illumination from HDR environments
Procedural sun & sky models
Extensible with custom lights through the V-Ray SDK

Shaders

Physically plausible materials
Blurry reflections/refractions
Accurate highlights
Sub-surface scattering
Support for efficient material layering
Extensible with custom shaders through the V-Ray SDK

Camera effects

Depth-of-field with bokeh effects
Accurate motion blur
Physical camera model
Extensible with custom cameras through the V-Ray SDK

Extras

Toon effect
Fur generator/raytracer
Extended matte/shadow capabilities
Support for Render-to-Texture mode of 3ds Max
VRaySphereFade to isolate only specific portions of the scene for compositing

Frame buffer

V-Ray specific frame buffer with integrated color corrections and display of multiple rendering elements
Direct rendering to disk for extremely large images, either as OpenEXR files or as .vrimg files

*all the features are subject to change without special notice.

Pixologic ZBrush

2010-04-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

Image by Francois Rimasson

Now with GoZ

One of the core functions of ZBrush has always been to provide artists the ability to create in an environment that allows for complete freedom of expression. The lack of technical barriers that make working within ZBrush feel like real world sculpting and painting is why so many have created such ground breaking work.
With GoZ there is no need to invest time in setting up shading networks for your normal, displacement, and texture maps. With a single click of a button, GoZ will transfer your mesh to a GoZ-enabled application of your choice, and instantly set up all the appropriate shading networks for you. Upon sending your mesh back to ZBrush. GoZ will automatically remap the existing high-resolution details to the incoming mesh, GoZ will take care of simple operations - such as correcting points & polygons order - as well as more advanced operations that require complete remapping. The updated mesh is immediately ready for further detailing, map extractions, and transferring to any other GoZ-enabled application.

Current GoZ enabled applications

• Maya
• Cinema 4D
• Modo
• With many more coming soon!.

"GoZ has completely changed the way I work between Maya and ZBrush! It's amazing how fast I can now transfer work between the two. The speed it brings to my workflow allows me to be much more productive then I have ever been. I love how it lets me focus on just being creative."
– Brandon Fayette
Lead Artist, Bad Robot
GoZBrush beta tester

Overview

One small step for man. One extraordinary leap for artists.

Every hero's journey begins with a single step. ZBrush 3 is the next step; the next step in the creation process; the step that liberates you from the restrictions of conventional software; the step that carries you beyond experience and knowledge and into pure imagination. Sculpt using materials that so closely resemble earth you'll wonder why your hands aren't dirty. Pose your sculpture as if you were moving its limbs with your hands rather than a stylus and a tablet. ZBrush's technology allows you to ignore technology altogether, transferring its power directly to your hands, hands that can be used to create, sculpt, imagine and cast your creations as heroes in your own journey.

Rapid Start:
Dive right into creating with an interface designed to give you the basics, make you comfortable, and get you ready for the next step.
Transpose:
Quickly and easily position, pose or deform your model. Turn your default static model into something dynamic and beautiful.
Subtools:
Split your model into several components, work on each component as if it's a separate mesh, only bringing them together at the end of your design process.
Tweak, magnify, pinch, flatten, and morph.
A quiver of brushes lets you abuse and refine your model to your imagination's satisfaction. Furthermore, Z3 lets you customize your brushes to create even more variations on a theme.
Mesh extraction:
Add to existing geometry, quickly make a jacket, hat, gloves, etc. for your hero character's journey.
Real-Time Shadows:
As you sculpt, real-time shadows provide you with visual feedback, without the need for rendering.
Layers:
Work with your model at numerous and varied stages of its evolution. Give your character features in one layer, or turn them off to refine your character's underlying features.

Image by Taron Baysal

Core Features

ZBrush 3.1 gives you access to unparalleled power and control previously unknown in digital art creation software. Controls enable sculptors to create with a stylus and a tablet as intuitively as if they were using their hands on a block of clay. ZBrush further extends the creation experience, harnessing technology and providing artists with a multitude of creation-enhancing tools.
Transpose

Posing your model is as simple as moving an action line. Create a mask to isolate an area, click and drag. It’s no more complicated than posing a clay model with your fingers.
MatCap

Matcap lets you apply real world texturing and lighting to your model. Sample a few points from your chosen photograph or texture; apply to your model, and seconds later you’ve got a model complete with texture and lighting.
Perspective Camera

The perspective camera gives you the ability to apply perspective to your model, giving you the ability to adjust your focal length at will.
Speed

Multithreaded support for up to 256 processors let ZBrush compute at the speed of your imagination.
Higher Poly Count

Up to a billion polygons allow you to create objects with almost infinite detail.
HD Geometry

HD Geometry allows you to divide your model to 1 billion polygons, and your system will only process the polygons visible onscreen.
Topology

ZSpheres makes simple and fast work of creating a new topology. And the projection feature lets you shrink-wrap your topology to an existing model.
Scripted Interface

ZBrush’s integrated scripting lets you create an interface that suits your workflow and your needs. Move existing interface items as you like, or add entirely new buttons and palettes to your interface.
User Defined Alpha and texture Start up

Customize your environment with the alphas, textures, materials and plug-ins you use most.
New Movie Palette

Create, view or export ZBrush tutorials, movies, turntables, models, and even time-lapse videos of your sculpting process.
64 bit support

ZBrush takes full advantage of your 64-bit system.

Image by Magdalena Dadela

Sculpt

ZBrush 3.1 brings you the next step in sculpting, letting you create with shadows, alphas, providing you with a huge palette of brushes, and the ability to create even more. This powerful, scriptable tool lets you control your sculpt as never before, Using a number of mimic materials, you can simulate gravity, create numerous variations atop your original, or even using your original geometry to give your model a whole new wardrobe. And if you’re new to ZBrush, Rapid Start lets you dive into creating with the smallest possible learning curve.
Full 3D Sculpting With Alphas

A powerful new feature; sculpt with any ZBrush alpha or your own. Add a whole new level of detail to your brushes. You may even choose to have ZBrush start up with your own custom alpha.
RealTime Shadows

Real-time shadows provide a level of visual feedback as you sculpt, giving you the ability to control the lighting conditions, seeing the lighting you prefer, and controlling the lighting conditions ultimately used in your model.
Matcap Materials

Sculpt using a number of mimic materials, including two flavors of red wax, pearl cavity and white cavity.
New Brushes

A quiver of new brushes lets you create as never before. And if the ones we include aren’t enough, ZBrush lets you create even more.
Lazy Mouse

Lazy Mouse provides you with a way to control your curves and steady your hand, creating precise and controlled brush strokes. Effortlessly.
Gravity

Simulate wrinkles, age, wind, magnetism or other gravitational pulls.
Subtools

Subtools let the artist treat a single mesh as numerous independent objects, giving you the ability to create much larger structures than your system would otherwise permit.
3D Layers

Release yourself from a linear workflow, and work on as many versions, details and elements as you wish, in whatever order suits your process and your creation.
Mesh Extraction

Use existing geometry to adorn your model with a jacket, helmet, gloves, vest or whatever garments it may need.
Local Subdivision

Add detail to only the areas where you need it most, add local subdivision around an eye to create crow feet wrinkles, or a forehead to make creases, all while the remaining geometry stays lighter.
Rapid Start

Sculpt immediately with Rapid Start, a gateway to the power of ZBrush without the need to invest in time learning features unnecessary to an artist wishing to dive into sculpting.
Lasso Tool

Create freeform selections with the Lasso tool.

Image by Magdalena Dadela

Paint

ZBrush 3.1 releases you from the restrictions of traditional software, giving you the freedom to create the same way you have since you picked up your first crayon. Paint directly on your model, on your canvas, or directly on a texture map you wrap to your model; switch seamlessly between ZBrush and your favorite image editing software. The options are as infinite as your imagination.
ZApplink V2

Integrate your image editing software into your ZBrush workflow. Use Photoshop's layer mask, to mask parts of your ZBrush canvas, save and load views, create layers, generate a character sheet with all views of your model, and that's just the beginning.
Poly Painting

Paint directly onto your model. If you like, you can transfer all your detail to a texture map when you've finished painting.
Cavity Masking

Achieve real-world effects of timeworn cracks and weatherworn crevices. Cavity masking allows you to automatically mask fine recesses so your work only affects the highest or lowest point of your model's surface.

ZBrush 3 Demo Movie Watch examples of some of the great new features in ZBrush 3.
Click to watch (Opens new window, 32.8 MB)
(Requires QuickTime)

RealFlow 4 form Next Limit

2010-04-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

RealFlow 4 is a dynamics and physics simulator, capable of simulating phenomenon such as water, gas, rigid and soft body dynamics including cloth and tearing.

RealFlow is one of those programs that batter down the limitations of today's 3D applications and computers, RealFlow is most commonly used as a liquid simulator and as a physics solver since most 3D applications can’t manage effects like realistic liquid flow out of the box.

The way RealFlow works is that it utilizes particles and the distance and relation between them to get the work done depending on how you want your liquid to look. There are 3 steps in a workflow that has anything to do with RealFlow.

Simulation: Particles are simulated in relation to each other and the environment.
Meshing: a mesh is calculated and wrapped around the particles , making then visible to the renderer.
Import: the generated mesh is exported to your 3D application of choice.

After simulation the scene is recalculated and a mesh is wrapped around it based on the given settings, without a mesh wrap the liquid simulation will not be visible to any renderer, after a mesh has been created for each frame, that mesh animation in imported into a 3D application where shaders are applied and then it is ready to render.

It is important to know that RealFlow is extremely heavy on the computer’s processor as well as the hard disk as it has to cache out all the particle data and then the mesh data that wraps it.
Integration:
As far as integration is concerned RealFlow used a format called .SD to communicate with a 3D application, SD stands for Scene Data and supports a wide verity of applications.

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My productions application of choice

2010-04-23T11:23:00.001-07:00

What is Autodesk 3ds Max?

3D Studio Max, 3ds Max or Max for short is a high end top of the line, industry standard 3D Production package developed by Autodesk with a full featured tool set offering you whatever you could possibly need for making amazing CGI, visualizations and animations.

3ds Max is one of the most popular and most widely used 3D production packages used in the media industry, gaming industry, construction and architecture, visualizations and much more, ranging from top selling games to blockbuster movies.
The beauty of 3ds Max is that it allows you to create very appealing content and very rewarding renders with just a little bit of experience with the software which all goes down to its streamlined easy to manage and highly organized and customizable interface.
3ds Max provides its users that very edge of control and power over their creations without, sucking the fun out of it, and without making the process complex and tedious thanks to its brilliant interface.

Max has come a long way since its release back in 1990, with 12 releases from 1990 to 2009, Max is now more powerful and versatile than ever before now available in 2 version 32-bits which is limited to 4GBs of RAM and 64-bits allowing users to fully utilize their RAM and is expandable from 4GBs onwards, out of the box it offers 2 renderers, Max's Default Scanline renderer and the high-end Mental Ray renderer (Discreet 3ds Max 6 and later) which is capable of expandability to up to unlimited processing cores, it offers advanced and powerful modeling tools for polygonal, NURBS, spline modeling. It has a very powerful rigging and animation system called Character Studio, and a highly capable physics simulator called Reactor, Max also offers users a particle system called PFlow or Particle Flow which is widely used in making mind blowing visual effects.
If you ever feel limited by Max's tool set and features, Max's offers its users access to MAXScript the software's own programming language that allows you to fiddle with the under-the-hood components of the software, allowing you to make your own tools, loops, algorithms, particle systems, the possibilities with MAXScript are practically endless the only limit is your imagination and creativity.
And even if that is not enough to fulfill your production needs the market is full of low profile to high-end plug-ins that either work within Max's interface or as an external program, some of the most popular ones are from Sitni Sati, they offer an advanced fluid simulator called FumeFX, and a widely used visual effects plug-in called AfterBurn which is used to make realistic explosions.

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e-on software , Vue 7

2010-04-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Vue is an advanced, feature rich but easy to use environment creation software, capable of rendering extremely realistic scenes, the way Vue manages environments is indeed a breakthrough, if Vue did not exist then realistic environment creation would still be one of the impossibilities in the field of CGI.

The unique and efficient way that Vue manages environments is that they bring instancing into play, making it light on the RAM and increasing productivity, in fact this way is so powerful that Vue can render scenes over 50 billion polygons dense, Vue reduces the actual scene to an order of a few thousand polygons in the viewport and when you hit render it brings in the real meat and soul of the environment to life.

Apart from polygons Vue has advanced in many other environmental effects such as volumetric and advanced light rendering, the water rendering that Vue is capable of is just beautiful, volumetric and spectral clouds add a ton of life to the scene and a lighting system that is aware of what time of day you are aiming the scene to be at, not to mention the extremely powerful Ecosystem feature that comes in Vue, that allows you to create very realistic, very dense and highly interactive foliage in your scene you can literally populate forests with it.

Coming to the integration with your favorite 3D application, as of Vue 7 the integration of Vue in conjunction with 3dsmax and Maya has been improved dramatically and has actually become a lot more fun and productive to use, indeed a great upgrade from Vue 6, the integration that Vue 6 had or at least what they called it, was a good way to increase your stress, give you a headache and make your work slower and more painful all at wonderful price of over a 1000 bucks, since that is not the case anymore and Vue integrates into your workflow better than any other software out there, it now acts like a plug-in inside your application giving you all the creation tools without ever leaving the comfort of the native 3D application while at the same time utilizing Vue’s mind blowing rendering system.

Once Vue’s world in integrated with the scene in your 3D application the results can be amazing, Vue uses the Mental Ray rendering engine that comes in Autodesk’s 3D applications, you can control and use lighting and shaders from your application as well as Vue and the best part is that you can populate forests and paint foliage using Vue’s Ecosystem without crashing your system, as the use of Ecosystem's can lead to a scene as heavy as 10 billion or more polygons, all that can be rendered on a modest system so you won't go bankrupt buying massive servers to get small jobs done.

Vue is indeed a very powerful piece of software and one can’t disagree that it is in fact a breakthrough in the field of CGI.

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New to the world of production?

2010-04-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Some common questions that arise in the minds of almost every beginner looking to make a career in production:
Where should I start? What application to use? And most importantly, what application is the best?
Now as anyone who has experience in the fields of software and design would say, "There is no one answer to these questions" but what I will help you guys do is to zero in on what suits you guys the best by analyzing your requirements one by one.
First and foremost I would like to clarify for you people what I mean by "Production", in the film and entertainment industry a production means the compilation of all the digital content and CGI (computer generated imagery) into a final product, what that product will be is totally up to you, that is if you are working on your own, otherwise such decisions are made by the director of the production studio but as long as that is not the case your are the director , the producer , you have full control over what you want to create and how you want to create.
Coming to the question of "where to start?” Now to answer this you have to ask yourself a few quick questions, what section of the production pipeline are you aiming to make your career in, here are a few steps of the pipeline:
· 3D Modeling
· 3D Animation
· 2D Animation
· Compositing
· Visual effects
· Video editing
· Rendering
This is a very rough sketch of the processes included in production but seeing this you can slim down the production process into 2 parts 3D and 2D , there are many more fields and sub fields that one can specialize in but for now this should get you going, I for one started out as a 3D Modeler and then over time I came across different programs, now if you are into the video editing and compositing side you will not have to deal with 3D at least not as much because in such a case all the video is shot from a real camera or is coming from the guys working in the 3D department , in any case the video is imported into software for refining, that is where you come in as a video editor, compositor or visual effects artist your job will be to add all the sauce and spices to the video, fix any issues and then render the final production.

As for a person in the 3D side of production, his job is to model, texture, animate and render and send the raw rendered production to the compositors and video editors, depending on which sub field of 3D you wish to specialize in your jobs may be more or less.

Coming to what application to use and which is better, this again varies from person to person, I personally prefer Autodesk and Adobe software for my work but there is so much out there in the market that a starter might find himself totally lost. For 3D we have countless software, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D, LightWave, Hexagon, Modo, Blender, for 2D image and video editing and creation we have, Photoshop, Corel Draw, After Effects, Premiere, Sony Vegas, Combustion, Fusion , Digital Fusion and the list just goes on and on.

Most people might say that Maya is better than 3ds Max, or After Effects is better than Digital Fusion and some might even say that if you want to go into the gaming industry you should chose 3dsmax and if you want to go in the Film industry you should chose Maya but let me tell you guys something even though 3ds Max is the most popular when it comes to gaming, at the end of the day you will find that both Maya and 3ds Max can achieve the same results in about the same time, this applies to all the other programs I have mentioned as well as the video editing software, it all goes down to what interface and layout suits you best, in some cases you might have to learn a software due to the requirements of the studio you are working in but once you have a solid hold on one software of its kind then the rest comes by its self, you will just have to familiarize yourself with the new buttons and procedures but it will not take you long to figure out everything because you will be aware how these things actually work under the hood.

Content creation and production is an art in its self, very engaging, very interesting , and very rewarding, just the feeling of all your effort coming to life at render time is enough to keep you going on your path towards superiority in the field.

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Zbrush From Pixologic

2010-04-23T11:02:00.001-07:00

Zbrush a breakthrough indeed, developed by Pixologic it is a must have tool for any digital artist. Zbrush deals with 3D in a totally different perspective and is primarily used as a sculpting software application that allows artist to add mind-blowing amounts of detail to their models.

ZBrush has a 2.5D environment it is not 2D and it is not 3D, it is based on pixols, a pixol is similar to a pixel but with the added property to depth, this amazing technology allows the software to handle models peaking at millions of polygons and still be able to give real time viewport feed back as the model is edited.

The main limitation of that arises when using ZBrush is when you have edited your model and it's time to take it to your 3D application for rendering, the meshes that are produced in ZBrush are so dense and heavy consisting of millions of polygons that the 3D application crashes 8 out of 10 times, to combat this limitation a technique called normal mapping is used, a map with all the depth and height information is calculated by ZBrush and spat out, the map can then be applied to a low res 3D model in the application and get a detail that was made it ZBrush without going through endless crashes.

ZBrush is also used as a texturing application due to its powerful painting tool set, artist can texture their models in a way similar to coloring in a coloring book, ZBrush automatically makes a map for your model and that can be used for rendering later on.

ZBrush has support for Wacom tablets and tablets from many other brands, if ZBrush is going to become a part of your workflow then I recommend that you use a tablet as it greatly increases the interactivity and productivity as it has support for pressure.
Overall ZBrush is an extremely powerful application with powerful painting and sculpting features, but at it end of the day it is even more fun to use and play around with and my personal favorites.

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Programs to extend the tool set of 3ds max and Maya

2010-04-23T10:56:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered how some of the most highly complex effects in CGI are made? Most of these effects go out of the reach of almost every out of the box 3D package in the market, so how are these effects achieved? That is a very good question that may arise in one's mind.

The fact is that the 3D packages do not have the specific tool set to perform such activities and that is where the need to extend them becomes apparent, thankfully today’s software market is rich in applications with powerful toolsets to provide just the result one is looking for, these applications are bought separately and work either in sync or through import and export in conjunction to you primary application.

Unlike a plug-in which integrates its self into the application’s interface these applications have a interface of their own, some of the most popular one used in today’s production industry are, Vue from e-on a French software company, there is RealFlow from NextLimit and Zbrush from Pixologic.

Vue 7 is an extremely powerful environment creation software capable of handling renders weighing Billions of polygons.
RealFlow is an advance particle and dynamics simulation package.
Zbrush is a 2.5D sculpting and texturing software , capable of managing tens of millions of polygons.

This massive suite of extension software is often more fun to play with when someone is first starting out, I would say ZBrush is by far my number one favorite, due to the edge of interactivity it provides in a semi 3D enjoinment, it's just an awesome experience working with it.