One frustrating thing about being a microfilmmaker is that we can rarely afford to rent a helicopter to fly us around a mountain for that perfect aerial shot, nor can we spend months location scouting to find that perfect landscape to serve as a backdrop to our final scene. While low-budget filmmakers have tried to create these things in 3D applications on their own computers, most have found that, in order to create something realistic enough to actually look authentic, they either need about ninety years or about ninety more animators to create a 5-minute sequence. This is where the Vue software enters.
Created by a French college student named Nicholas Phelps in 1993, Vue attempted to create a simple way to construct complex animated landscapes. At first it was in the domain of animators and artists, but, more recently, it’s grown powerful and realistic enough to be embraced by television networks and motion picture studios.
In fact, if you’ve seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, you’ve seen a major motion picture that utilized Vue’s natural landscape and sky creation engine heavily. In fact, Industrial Light and Magic used it to create the entire island Jack Sparrow had to escape from in that movie. Now, after much anticipation, Phelps’ software development company, E-On, releases the next version of Vue: Vue 6.
Ease of Use
Now, before I go into the Ease of Use section, I want to clarify some things. First off, I do have a fairly long history with 3D rendering, which goes back to the early ‘90’s when I was majoring in computer-aided drafting with Autocad 13 and the very first 3D Studio (before Max was ever added to the name). Despite my history with these types of software packages, I still tend to see things through the eyes of a filmmaker, not a 3D illustrator. As such, when I say a 3D program is easy to use, I mean that it is easy for a filmmaker who has little or no experience with 3D software to use. Normally, I will not say that any 3D software package is easy to pick up and use with little or no experience with 3D software. However, as you’re about to read, there is always an exception to the rule!
While initial viewing of this program might make you believe that it’s fairly complicated to get started with, once you play around with it and use the included tutorial you’ll find that it’s actually very simply laid out. (Of course, if you do happen to be familiar with other 3D programs, your adjustment to Vue 6 will be even easier due to the fact that it will let you choose to have it mimic the look and feel of the following popular 3D programs: 3D Studio Max, LightWave, Cinema4D, XSI, and Maya.)
However, as I mentioned at the beginning, even if you’re unfamiliar with 3D programs, you’ll find that Vue 6’s basic features become easy to access very quickly, with little time spent hunting for obscure buttons, commands, or other options. (Now, with that said, the more complex and precisely controlled features have a fairly steep learning curve, but there’s a surprising amount you can accomplish before getting into these more complicated elements.)
Once you start the program, you can choose to create a new scene which will allow you to choose a basic combination of sky and ground to get you started. While you can delete or remove any of these presets, they do a great job of allowing beginning Vue users to get started easily. This is especially true since many of the sky presets already have pre-animated winds, clouds, and sunlight.
