The fact that many of the presets include the pre-animated winds becomes amazingly helpful since all the included props for Vue are already rigged for physics. As such, whether you leave the presets alone or add additional weather or turbulence patterns, animating things like plants, water, and other weather-effected terrain is amazingly easy. Even more so when motion paths of things like wind and turbulence can be easily keyframed and the affected terrain simply “reacts” to these items. (Because wind and turbulence patterns can simply be directed at plants or clouds, it becomes a lot more like simply shooting your scene rather than creating it, which is a major boon to those who are unfamiliar with 3D programs or for those of us who simply do not have the patience for minutely animating everything in a scene.)
What’s also nice is that even when you create very direct movements of weather, wind, and turbulence patterns, the plant or cloud reactions don’t show a lot of clipping, which was one big problem that I had with the physics engine for hair and cloth in response to wind in Poser 7. (You can read the review of Poser 7 in this issue.) This is not to say that extreme weather and turbulence choices won’t yield extremely unrealistic animations that are a bit quirky, but these can readily be dialed back to get the effect you’re looking for.
From here, it’s a simple matter to add terrain features like mountains and canyons or water elements like oceans and lakes. What’s especially cool is that any features that would normally be asymmetrical in real life, like mountains or rocks, are randomly generated when you place them within your scene, which gives them very naturalistic-looking physical anomalies. These elements can then be worn down or dug away with a variety of naturalistic tools, so that you can form your canyon or mountain or glacier exactly the way you want it.
After that, adding additional elements from simple houses and cars and plants to entire animated eco-systems is extremely easy. Because of the seamless model rigging and physics engine behind the scenes, Vue6 comes close to doing for 3D animation what SonicFire Pro does for film scores. (I say close, because Vue 6 has a lot more features that can be customized for those who wish to do so than SonicFire Pro, but you get the point.) It allows you to use broad, simple strokes to create photo-realistic motion backgrounds that stand up beautifully, even under intense scrutiny.
(Now, for maximum ease of use, I would recommend checking out Richard Schrand’s book,
Vue 6 Revealed, which is easy to understand and will really help you pick up the more advanced elements in Vue 6. )
Depth of Options
To prepare for this review, I pulled up and printed the list of new features from E-On’s website, so I wouldn’t miss anything as I tested the program. The list was 48 pages long! (Feel free to read through it at your leisure Here ) With that said, I will not be going through every improvement found in Vue 6, but will instead be touching on some of the improvements that will most noticeably relate to filmmaking, This is especially true because many of the improvements come in the form of a new programming engine that accelerates Vue’s performance, as well as productivity improvements that streamline how you can interact with Vue.
As I alluded to in the ‘Ease of Use’ Section, the overall approach to Vue has been to allow you to create highly customized, highly realistic landscapes, seascapes, space-scapes, and other outdoor scenes with maximum adjustability, but with minimum effort to get started. In the newest version, additional abilities for subsurface scattering, radiosity, improved displacement map options, and multi-shape area lights give you much more ability to render indoor scenes realistically, as well. (This is especially true for Vue 6 Infinite and Vue 6 xStream users, as there is a special indoor rendering optimization setting in these two versions.)
, which is easy to understand and will really help you pick up the more advanced elements in Vue 6. )
