Vue from the top

Since it's the holidays, I've got around to spending some time tinkering with another one of those 3D programs I like so much, and writing up a little bit about it.

This one's called Vue and it's from E-On software. They bill it as "digital nature" software, which in plain english means it's a landscape generator. Fellow old farts like me will remember a package called KPT Bryce from the mid nineties which did roughly the same thing (Bryce still exists by the way as the property of DAZ software and is well worth playing with) and Vue owes that dinosaur a lot for its evolution.

The work flow is simple: pick a sky with sun, clouds and mist, add seas, land and mountains as you see fit, sprinkle it with trees, bushes and flowers then render it all. If that sounds suspiciously like good fun, it's because it is - great fun! You'll definitely feel a bit god-like as you create and alter your own little worlds. The package does manage a neat trick: it's very good at producing instant results with masses of preset skies, clouds, mountains and materials to choose from but if you want to you can actually tweak every minute detail of the environment to get exactly what you want - this is no toy, the software is apparently well-used by film studios to produce landscapes for special effects.

So far so good; it's fun to use, clever, intuitive and can produce pretty incredible results.

So what's the downside? Well, there are a couple of issues that keep this from wider use. Most important is that the ability to create new objects is limited - terrains and simple solids are easy enough but that's about it. If you want anything even remotely sophisticated - the spray cans in my examples were created and textured in Maya - you'll need another package with a proper modeller. Vue can import most common file types though (I used .obj) so it's not a disaster.

The other niggle is a real double-edged sword. As I said earlier the renderer is great at producing instant results and it has a range of environment types which simulate physical lighting conditions. Most will be familiar to experienced 3D users - radiosity, global illumination and spectral models. These can be selected and swapped in a couple of clicks and generally produce good results. This is great for beginners and the time-poor but if you're used to using Mental Ray or another third-party renderer the lack of fine control will quickly grate. In short if you like the ground-up approach of Mental Ray, you probably won't like the renderer much, but if you think MR is fiddly, you'll love it. The renders generally have a pretty distinctive quality which marks them as being Vue images, but that's true of most renderers and not really a criticism.

So all in all, it's a bit of a conundrum. I definitely recommend it even if you just want to have some fun and it should find a place in most 3D users' collections as an alternative renderer once in a while. But since you'll need to already have a separate program for modelling anything beyond the most basic, you'll probably use it less than you might like.