As already with the past versions e-on software presents a high quality product with Vue 6 and the high quality is not just limited to the actual software but you can see it also in the manual, the support and the additional objects, plants, materials atmospheres etc. which you get with the product to make sure, that you can produce astonishing images within minutes after you have installed the product.
The step from Vue 5 to Vue 6 is huge. Never before they added so many features to the software. You could almost say that in Vue 6 everything is new. The following review is based on the XStream version (not all of the features mentioned are in all versions of Vue 6 available).
A general problem of such feature rich software packages is, how to give new users an easy start with the software and on the other hand offer as much flexibility to the professional user as possible. Beside the very intuitive user interface, e-on software added a couple of additional features to eliminate this problem.
For all those who are already familiar with a 3D-package, Vue 6 offers the possibility to adjust it’s interface to the typical interface of that application, so that you don’t loose time in learning the new interface. Of course you can customize almost everything to adjust the interface exactly to your needs.
As already in earlier versions, you get a lot of additional objects which you can use to create your images. The following image shows a small section of the plant library. As you can see there is also a description of the plants which can be very useful for plants which you don't know (especially to know their real height and where it normally grows).
It is also important to note, that if you use several instances of a plant, Vue will make each instance a little bit different to make sure, that the total scene gets a natural look. Below you see a row of cactus plants, which I just put one after the other:
If this natural variation is not sufficient or if you want to create entirely new plants, you can do it in the plant editor, where you can even check how your plant responds to wind.
In nature you typically need quite a lot of plants to get a realistic look and if you have to place them all by yourself, you need either eternities or it will get the typical "computer look". To avoid this problem e-on software introduced already in version 5 the so called eco-systems, where you can define which plants and objects with which properties should be used according to which laws to populate a certain region. Although this might sound like work, you can again count on the help of a library where you will find ready to use eco-systems (which again can be easily modified).
In version 6 these eco-systems were significantly improved: you can now paint your eco-system on other objects. This is especially useful if you want to create very complex scenes.Beside these eco-system "materials" you will also find clouds, volumetric materials, landscapes, subsurface scattering materials, and displacement materials among many others. In contrast to simple bump maps, where you just create the illusion of a 3D topography, the displacement maps really produce a 3D topography as you can see in the following image:
Another very handy feature is the smart drop. When you normally drop an object onto another, you will end up with something like the image below:
Unfortunately in real life the brick wouldn't balance like that on the ball, but simply fall down. And this is exactly what the smart drop feature of Vue 6 is also doing:
The atmosphere editor shows now besides the features known from the earlier Vue versions additional settings for spectral atmospheres. As you can see in the screenshot below it is very easy to create an atmosphere with multiple cloud layers.
Another very useful feature are the special material properties which you can simply add to another material. If you have for example a ocean scene like the one below ...
... you can simply add the "foam" material to the water and you get a very nice shoreline along the coast:
However the absolute Highlight of the XStream version is its integration into other products. Everybody who works regularly with 3D programs is very familiar with the problems involved in getting data from one application into another application - most of the time the data can not be directly imported or exported, which means that a 3rd party converter is needed which not just converts the data, but many times also slightly changes them, since not all the features can be converted or the file formats are not as compatible as they should be etc. In other words: getting data from one application into another one is always annoying.
Exactly for these reasons I was pretty sceptical, when I first read the Vue 6 claims to integrate smoothly in all the mature applications like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D or Lightwave. For the review I have chosen to test it's integration with Maya. The "installation" was as simple as it could be by just calling a script from within Maya, which did all the necessary work and installed a new shelf into Maya, where I had all the important Vue extensions.
Since the installation was so smooth and easy, I was waiting for the though part. As a starting point and to see how much was already running I decided to load a not to simple Vue scene (including trees, water, atmosphere,…) into Maya and see how much it would load. To my surprise it loaded everything and I could even add Maya stuff to the scene.
As a next step I tried checked the rendering. If I render it in Maya, would the plants and the other Vue specific things also render properly? Surprisingly enough it rendered as if I did it directly in Vue.
Since I didn't expect such a good data exchange I was pretty surprised by these excellent results and I was determined to find the limitations. As the ultimate test I created a Maya scene and worked on it with the Maya and Vue interface simultaneously. It is hard to believe, but whatever I did was instantaneously updated in the other application (I also tested it on a machine with just 256MB RAM and even there it worked smoothly!). Basically it was as if I worked in just one application! Vue xStream and Maya really merged to one application in which I could smoothly combine the advantages of both worlds! Below you see a picture with Maya (on the left side) and Vue (on the right side) working on the same scene.
Despite my extensive testing I couldn't find a situation, where the exchange between Vue and Maya didn't work. This is really something you have to see with your own eyes to be able to believe it (especially if you are familiar with the exchange problems you normally encounter between different applications).
The list with great features could be continued endlessly but summarizing it, we can say that Vue 6 is currently one of the best professional cgi tools on the market. This can also be seen by the fact that Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) got this year the Academy Award for their work for which they used Vue. Although Vue offers the option to use other render engines, it often makes sense to render scenes made with other programs in Vue, since it's render engine offers features which are missing in many other programs. To be really able to appreciate Vue's capabilities you should download the personal learning edition and test it for your own. Have a lot of fun!