The most noticed and most necessary feature within Vue 7 Infinite is its Ecosystem Technology. If you’re working in 3D and you needed to create a dense forest that is both diverse and convincing, the thought of having to build all of those assets can be overwhelming; and that’s putting it lightly. Within Vue 7 Infinite, the ecosystem technology allows you to create a populated land mass that extends far into the horizon. All you have to do is specify what vegetation, trees, rocks, etc. that you want to span the region, and the Ecosystem material will populate it for you. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have any input as to how it spreads around the different objects. The material editor permits you to layer your different elements, tweak the density and randomness of its proliferation, and even how it’s placed based on the altitude and slope of the terrain. Those are just a few of the options that are made available to you to custom grow your landscape. The amazing part is that the ecosystem material utilizes the new Dynamic Population Technology to allow the near-infinite fabrication to not heavily tax your computer as you work. Instances are put in to represent the organic material so you can work quickly, but even the preview renders take a short time to see so you can always double-check through a preview. And if your scene does get too heavy, you can change the display options of not only the viewport you are working in, but even individual objects too. All of these features blend together to provide amazing results within a flexible environment.
Procedural terrain gives the viewer a seemingly infinite extension of the landscape.
Another technology that can be used along with the ecosystem material is the Solidgrowth vegetation system. Now on its 4th iteration, the Solidgrowth system boasts better fidelity in the rendering of densely packed vegetation both near and far. Without having to resort to high anti-aliasing, the new algorithm allows for flicker-free animation. Add in an assortment of over 160 different species of plants to choose from, and the possibilities are endless.
A few new features are now available for working with terrains. Presets for procedural terrains can now be selected from to give you a starting point; all of which can be modified further and saved as personal presets. You can control the distribution of the materials using the altitude of the terrain and 16-bit heightfield information can be imported in to create a more intended layout for your set piece. But all of these ways of cultivating your terrain can be modified on the fly with the sculpting brush and additional erosion effects. The dedicated natural effects utilize the noise nodes to help convey a strong base in which you can build your environments on.
With the Ecosystem, a procedural terrain can be populated by any object or material you want without you having to place them all down yourself.
When looking over the changes that have been made to the Materials section of Vue 7, the most significant seems to be the inclusion of the SmartGraph to the function editor. The function editor in combination with the material(s) that you use can lead to hundreds of possibilities when trying to create results that are natural or otherwise. The Smart Graph offers a nodal layout in which you can link various facets of your material to aspects of other nodes, creating a linked hierarchy of functions. Besides affecting things through procedural, mathematical, or noise nodes, you can also create relationships between two different objects that affect their physical properties. For instance, linking the position of one object to change the color settings of another object as it moves along 3D space. This is an interesting feature that I’ve seen in a lot of other 3D applications and can now be enjoyed here as well.
