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Working Cheap

Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz

When it comes to animation programs, price does not always correspond with power.

Every now and then “hobbyware” graphics and animation programs like Vue 5 and Poser become so successful that even high-end users take notice. Poser has been there for a while, and it's easy now to take Vue seriously, with its powerful new version from E-on Software.

The product line is comprised of Vue 5 Infinite, for $599; Vue 5 Pro Studio, $399; and Vue 5 Esprit, $249. This article will focus on the feature set of Vue 5 Esprit, the most affordable member of the bunch.

Formerly called Vue d'Esprit, this powerful landscape-generation program for Mac and Windows has been winning over artists with an easy-to-use, all-in-one terrain generator, plant editor, and atmosphere generator. Bryce and World Builder have been around far longer, but Bryce lacks the features and World Builder lacks the user-friendly interface that has made Vue a bona fide hit with artists.

Vue 4 Pro was a breakthrough version. It surfed the overall increase in processing speed that has made creating and rendering large-scale models manageable with today's hardware. Only a few years ago, landscape programs all suffered from the same unnatural look. But since 2001, Vue has been used to produce exceptional digital illustrations.

If you have wanted to create elaborate digital landscapes but found learning Maya or 3ds Max too big a commitment, you will be happy to find out how quickly you can learn to create remarkable environments in a special-interest application like Vue 5.

The process is simple: Open a new project and select an atmosphere from the several dozen provided in the library. This sets the time of day, cloud pattern, amount of diffusion, and color of the light. Next you add a terrain, again chosen from a library. But like all prefab elements, you can edit the terrain and save it to the appropriate library under a new name. Trees, vegetation, materials, rocks, and atmospheres are all natural elements that can be added with a click of the mouse. Elements can be repositioned, scaled, and rotated in the scene.

Vue has all the usual basic controls for cameras and lights, and you can import into a Vue scene objects such as Poser characters or models from Maya, Lightwave, and 3ds Max. I wrote in a review of the previous version that Vue needed a few more features to bring it up to professional speed. E-on Software has answered many of my requests in Vue 5.

When you open Vue 5 there are no big surprises; the interface and tools deployed around the central window appear the same. But under the hood there are lots of new features.

I have always been impressed with the quality of rendering in Vue. Its SolidGrowth vegetation, now in its third generation, is excellent. The new atmospheric engine is even better than before, and it was always very good.

However, in previous versions Vue's renders did not always blend well with photography — a problem I discovered when creating digital matte paintings. Vue 5 now has Global Illumination and Global Radiosity, which help produce more photorealistic results by simulating indirect light. While optimized for landscape generation, these time-hogging rendering features are quite usable for single images and matte paintings. There is no way you would want to tackle a video project of hundreds of frames using Global Illumination or Renderosity without a very fast workstation. NTSC images of reasonable complexity that used Global Illumination took more than an hour on my dual-processor G5. However, great-looking images with different settings can be knocked out in less than 15 minutes.

Some other options for photorealistic work, but with faster renders, are High Dynamic Range Images (HDRI) and Image Based Lighting (IBL) — both new in Vue 5. IBL is probably the fastest rendering solution for indirect lighting, and it's nicely implemented. However, you will have to supply images taken on location using either the Spheron camera or a chrome ball (both expensive options). This feature is primarily of interest to visual effects artists. Some HDRI images are supplied on the Extras CD that comes with Vue 5.

Vue 5 uses a raytracer, and, while it makes stunning images, it is characteristically slow. Considering that landscapes are by definition complex, this makes for long renders even without using Global Illumination or Global Radiosity. For illustrations, render times are tolerable, but it's hard to imaging rendering 6 seconds of NTSC-sized images without five dual-processor machines in a render farm. Hobbyists not on deadline can afford to let their workstations operate for 20 or 30 hours — but not professionals with billable hours. Of course, this type of 3D animation would be slow in any software.

While Vue is a great application for making landscape images, the animation tools in Vue 5 are quirky. Seasoned animators will be mildly annoyed. For some reason the engineers at E-on Software have chosen to disregard common interface conventions that are found in Maya, XSI, 3ds Max, LightWave, and Cinema 4D and instead create their own eccentric versions of a timeline and function curve editor. Creating a simple camera movement without whiplash at the ease-out is frustrating, though I'm sure there are some tricks I have not uncovered. Still, why reinvent the wheel?

A Point At option for the camera would be great, and while there is a Camera Target, it shares keyframes with the camera. The Camera and other objects do not have independent animation control for rotation, roll, and tilt. There is also no way to control tension, continuity, and bias on the camera or object paths. The paths are splines, but there are no Bezier handles to control motion this way either.

Cinematic camera moves are sometimes difficult to accomplish, but Vue 5 excels at fly-through animations and provides simulations of camera views as seen from a car, motorcycle, helicopter, and pedestrian using Dynamic Motion Reaction technology. These are used in situations where precise framing and velocity are not critical. When combined with motion blur, very realistic camera jitter really helps sell the believability of a scene.

Two of the biggest additions to Vue 5 are procedural terrains and procedural textures. Before Vue 5, terrains were polygonal. This meant that the detail of the ground was finite. If your scene included terrain in the foreground, it appeared softer than that in the mid-ground or background. Procedural terrains solve the problem because they are created mathematically, taking the distance to the camera into account. You can move as close to the terrain as you want and always see the maximum amount of detail possible. However, procedural terrains render more slowly than do polygonal terrains, which are still available as an option. Both terrain types can be used in the same environment. This is a major step forward for Vue.

Procedural textures also provide infinite detail. They're a very powerful way to create textures. While procedural terrains are relatively easy to edit with a simple interface, procedural textures are far less intuitive. You access procedural textures in the Material Editor. There's a Basic Editor, an Advanced Editor, and a Function Editor.

Clicking on the Advanced Editor from within the Material Editor reveals dozens of parameters, all essentially mathematical functions such as noise and fractal operations that change the input values of visual attributes. This is a very powerful way to create textures, but it takes a long time to master. This is because no developer has successfully designed an interface bridge between visual/artistic concepts and mathematical values.

The easiest way to use the Material Editor is to begin with an existing material and experiment with the parameters. There is no shortcut to mastering procedural textures, and the basic interface is a good way to get your feet wet. For complete control, you can enter the Function Editor, a node-based texture design environment.

Vue 5 has a clear implementation of these advanced tools, and its SmartGraph helps guide the user through the intricacies of node-based design. It does this by automatically making only permissible connections in a given situation. Procedural Textures opens the door to high-end material creation for dedicated users with lots of time.

Vue 5 has adequate documentation, but even more is needed. The integrated Help menu covers the basics and the Tutorials are good to get you started, but, as with most applications, it's the intermediate-level artists who end up spending hundreds of hours at tasks that could be explained in a fraction of the time by expert users. In addition to the application disc, there's a disc of models and pre-built scenes. The scenes by top Vue artists are excellent. You learn a great deal by just opening them up and exploring the contents. It would have been even better if a text document accompanied each scene with some tips and hints from the artists — or better yet, a step-by-step explanation of how the scene was constructed.

At the moment, there are no third-party books or DVDs on Vue, resources that would help make the product even more accessible.

Compared to Maya, Vue 5 is easy to use, but easy is relative term — photorealistic 3D scene generation is challenging in any software. Vue 5 decreases the difficulty level significantly, but expect to spend lots of time becoming proficient.

I've covered many of the major new features, but there are more. Metablobs and Organic Modeling are largely one-trick ponies for liquid flows and splashes, but that comes up fairly often in a landscape program. Also new is the ability to camera-switch and perform post-processing effects within Vue.

Vue 5 Esprit is the entry-level landscape product in the E-on Software line. If that makes it sound like it's not powerful, think again. The results possible from the software would have been in line with work produced at top visual effects studios only five years ago.

There are also Pro Studio and Infinite versions of Vue that shipped earlier this year. Judging from the improvements in the basic version, the higher-end versions of Vue 5 could be blowouts for dedicated users.

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