Another new feature that’s been added to Vue 6 which is a joy for filmmakers who get tired of constantly keyframing animations in other programs is the addition of a new “Layers” feature. Working sort of liked “grouped layers” in Photoshop, each Layer you create in Vue 6 works like a platform for any content that you stack in it. While this obviously helps organize things better, this is amazingly helpful for coming up with broad animations for things like clusters of asteroids or clumps of user-created clouds. Once you move an entire layer en masse, you can then custom rotate or change the trajectory of each element to simulate random movement with a fraction of the work.
Vue has always supported a number of realistic cloud features, but Vue 6 adds new, interactive cloud layers and moveable MetaClouds. The spectral atmosphere engine allows you to control the environmental “chemistry”, causing light and cloud layers to behave in organic, real-world ways, allowing the creation of complex light effects like “Godrays”—the supernatural description for sunlight passing in hazy streamers from the clouds to the ground. The new interactive spectral cloud layer allows realistic fly-throughs, while the new MetaClouds can be individually keyframed and/or clustered for even more control of your cloud layer.
For creating realistic environments, adding plants on an individual basis is extremely tedious and time consuming. Enter the new EcoSystem Painter. Working with the new SolidGrowth plants in the newest version of EcoSystem, the EcoSystem Painter allows you to “paint” plants and trees across a landscape, with each plant being randomly different and unique in formation, even though its species is the same as its neighbors. You can also delete plants the same way, individually color them, and even create brand new species of SolidGrowth plants. While these “painting” features are quite helpful for folks using a mouse, it becomes amazingly powerful for folks who use a pressure-sensitive tablet, as the pressure they exert will subtly influence the final result.
As I mentioned before, there are at least 38 pages of other new features, but these are a few that are extremely useful to us as filmmakers.
Performance
Our test machine for this review was outfitted with a 1.86 Ghz Core2 Duo processor, 3 Gigs of RAM, and an nVidia Quadro FX 1500 graphics card. In such a configuration, the overall performance of Vue 6 Infinite was quite good, with rendering times that were pretty speedy for full-res work. With the constantly up-shifting levels of quality coming to filmmaking now that HD is becoming more prevalent and 2K and 4K cameras are becoming rentable (thanks to Red Digital), Vue 6 can render in any quality and size that you may need down the road, with heightened levels of subtlety that go three levels above Broadcast quality!
As I mentioned before, they rebuilt the rendering engine of Vue for Vue 6, which resulted in acceleration of rendering speed to approximately 130% of what it was in Vue 5. Additionally, Vue 6 supports the 64-Bit version of Windows XP Pro which does not have the 2 Gig RAM limit that most 32-bit applications have, resulting in a much faster experience for those with this operating system and larger amounts of RAM on their multi-processor machines.
To streamline Vue’s interim rendering with the expanded EcoSystem features, plants now can be shown (or represented) in seven levels of details, so that folks with slower machines can interact with their environments without slowing down when they’re creating large environments. To further speed things up, if your resources get bogged down at any time, Vue 6 now has a “Purge Memory” feature which allows you to clean up the application’s memory usage without having to restart your program and losing your undo data! A final improvement added to Vue 6 for more experienced 3D users is the ability to import 3D Studio Max and Maya files directly into Vue, which is very useful, especially now that Vue 6 has a better ability to render indoor scenes.
