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Vue 8 Esprit - What's New?

New Natural Scenery Creation Capabilities

Revolutionary 3D Terrain Sculpting Editor

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Strata 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.

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.

New Material Control

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.

Artistic Control and Performance

Rigged Meshes and Characters

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 (you can import fully rigged and animated meshes using Collada).

Vue pre-animated meshes are supported natively.

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.

Poser 8 Support

Vue 8 Esprit fully supports Smith Micro's Poser 8, including the ability to render Poser characters using Poser 8's shading tree.

You can load and render animated characters with full dynamic clothing and hair, and you can even re-pose the Poser 8 characters directly inside of Vue!

Improved Open GL Engine and Viewport Display

Shader Based Engine

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 and specular highlighting.

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

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.

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

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 utilizing the new Strata fractal filter

Other New Features

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Added dual destination render option - display to screen while rendering to disk
• When rendering to disk, image can be saved at user defined intervals
• Save/reload complete object graphs.