Vue 8.5 xStream - New in Vue 8.5

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.

Show features new to Vue 8.5 only

New Natural Scenery Creation Capabilities

Revolutionary 3D Terrain Sculpting Editor

Unlimited Material Painting

The material painting tool lets you paint distribution maps with any arbitrary number of materials. Easily add new materials to create extremely detailed distributions.

Toggle material masks to constrain painting of other materials inside existing distribution maps.

Material masks are now handled independently from the rest of the material, so you can rescale materials or use any type of coordinates without affecting the distribution.

Powerful 3D Sculpting Brushes

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.

New Sculpting Tools

Vue 8.5 introduces 4 powerful new sculpting brushes: Pinch, Flatten, Plateau and UniSlope.

The Pinch brush brings the terrain features closer together, while the Flatten, Plateau and UniSlope brushes let you accurately control the slope of your terrains.

Localized Infinite and Procedural Terrain Sculpting

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 preserving the procedural details around the localized features.

Zone Extraction

With Vue 8.5 you can extract a specific area of a procedural terrain with just one click! Simply select a zone and convert it to a separate procedural terrain.

This is ideal to create customized textures on specific areas.

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!

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.

Sculpt from References

You can now apply a bitmap to a terrain, and then view this bitmap inside the Terrain Editor as you sculpt the terrain.

This feature is particularly useful when recreating a terrain based on real world photo references.

It is also now possible to reset 2D and 3D sculpting independently - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

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.

Animated Planetary Cloud Density Maps

Vue 8.5 lets you define animated maps to control the density of your cloud layers on a planetary scale.

Using animated density maps, recreate such effects as the swirling hurricane opposite.

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 also available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Precise Artistic Control and Ease of Use Features

Interactive Cloud Control

In Vue 8.5, cloud layers can be handled like regular objects. They appear in the World Brower, and you can move, rotate or resize them interactively using the standard manipulation gizmos.

You can also use Vue's standard animation tools to control the movement/velocity of the clouds!

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 also 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 also available in the free Vue 8.4 update.

Improved Color Map and Filter Editors

The Color Map and Filter editors are significantly improved, with the ability to move groups of keypoints, change the color, hue, saturation and luminosity values of groups of keypoints or the entire color map. You can also invert filters and color maps, copy-paste groups of keypoints, etc.

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.

Camera exposure is now automatically reflected in the OpenGL views to provide a more accurate preview of the scene (shader engine only). This option can be disabled.

EcoSystem Display Improvements

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 also available in the free Vue 8.4 update

You can now change the display quality of EcoSystem instances on individual population elements (e.g. hide grass instances but show trees).

You can also decide which population elements will appear in full 3D near the camera (Full Quality Near Camera option).

You can also instantly limit the display quality of all EcoSystem instances in your scene using a single menu command or keyboard shortcut, for swifter navigation inside complex projects.

Dynamic EcoSystems can be seen in the previews by setting the number of instances to be displayed near the camera. You can refresh dynamic EcoSystem previews anytime by clicking the Preview button in the EcoSystem material.

Additionally, the Global EcoSystem is now available as a 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.

Advanced EcoSystem Control

With Vue 8.5, you can now drag multiple objects or plants from a browser into the EcoSystem population list, making the preparation of complex EcoSystems a lot quicker.

You can easily populate your global EcoSystem by dragging objects from the World Browser directly into the EcoPainter list.

The intensity of the color changes applied to EcoSystem populations can be controlled through the use of a new material setting. This setting can also be controlled using a function graph.

When painting EcoSystems, you can paint with the underlying EcoSystem material rules applied, so that, for instance, the influence of slope and altitude or the coloring rules are taken into account when painting instances.

When painting in the Global EcoSystem, you can accurately control the way instances are added by directly accessing the underlying material and customizing all the population rules.

Other Artistic Control Improvements

• Customizable “Lock camera above” behavior (above terrains, above other objects, etc.)
• OpenGL preview displays normal mapped surfaces
• You can assign colors to your graph nodes to make your graphs easier to understand
• You can lock the render area to avoid accidental modifications - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• You can also lock browser collections - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• Planes are now visible from all sides - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• Accurate OpenGL previewing of materials mapped in World coordinates - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• GPU resources can be displayed in the status bar - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• It is now possible to hide all the layers in the World Browser - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• You can copy paste objects to hidden or locked layers - this feature is also 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 also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• Planetary mapping node (to use planetary bitmaps inside materials/procedural terrains)
• 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 cloud 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
• When installing the application, you can now easily restore the default installation folder - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update

Improved Performance

Diagnostics Tools

In order to easily detect rendering bottlenecks and optimize your render times, Vue 8.5 now features the ability to generate diagnosis information on your renders. This includes, for each pixel in the image:

• Total rendering time of the pixel,
• Number of anti-aliasing rays,
• Number of texture anti-aliasing samples,
• Total number of sub-rays in the pixel,
• Total number of shadow rays,
• Max recursion depth reached by a sub-ray, and
• Number of final gather samples for that pixel.

This diagnosis information is available in separate render passes that can be viewed directly in the render output window. You can switch between the Color, Alpha, Z-Depth and Diagnosis passes instantly using the icons in the render output window.

Diagnosis passes are generated on demand (they add a slight overhead to the rendering process). They are a very valuable asset to better understand the overall rendering process.

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 rendering of displacement on standard terrains is greatly improved and no longer contingent upon the resolution of the terrain - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update

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.

Other Performance Improvements

• The quality of indirect lighting is increased in Preview mode - this feature is also 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 also 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 also 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
• You can configure the RenderCows to use any number of processors (e.g. if a multi-core workstation is used for design, you could setup a RenderCow to use a maximum of one or two cores, so as to limit the impact on overall system performance)
• The speed of handling of complicated group hierarchies is significantly increased - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• Default views are automatically resized to adjust according to internal units - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update

Deeper Interoperability

Global Gamma Control

New in Vue 8.5 is the ability to fully control the gamma of your workflow. Internally, Vue uses a linear workflow (gamma=1), but other elements in your pipeline may not use this (cameras and monitors typically use a gamma of 2.2).

The ability to fully control the gamma in Vue ensures perfect coherence all along your pipeline and will result in much higher fidelity of color and light in your final images.

You can define default input and output gamma settings as well as the gamma used for displaying textures and colors. These settings will be used for all imported texture maps as well as the color channel of exported renders.

You can also easily customize the input gamma on a per texture basis (the gamma values of your texture maps may differ depending on their source), and you can override the output gamma at the time of saving a picture.

Vue 8.5 also features a quick calibration tool to let you easily adjust the display gamma to best match your monitor.

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

• Define your own shortcuts in editors (panning, rotating, etc) to match settings in other applications
• EcoPainter brush size is now visible while painting (3ds Max and Cinema 4D only)
• Direct access to the sea level via xStream interface
• Improved previewing of procedural terrains in host application

General Import/Export Improvements

• The Z-Depth buffer can now be (optionally) anti-aliased
• Max->Vue Exporter: convert unrigged objects to standard meshes - this feature is also available in the free Vue 8.4 update
• Improved terrain exports - this feature is also 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