Vue 6.5 xStream

Vue 6 xStream offers professional CG artists a complete toolset for creating exceptionally rich and realistic natural environments and rendering them in 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D and XSI.

Access all the power of the world's leading 3D scenery program directly from within your favorite application. Create and edit extremely rich and realistic natural environments, and seamlessly blend them with Maya/Max/LightWave/C4D/XSI native scenes and animations.

Render everything together inside your favorite application, with full interaction between Vue and native elements, including 2-way mutual shadow casting, reflection, refraction and lighting.

Available for:

3ds max	Cinema4D	LightWave 3D	Maya	Softimage|XSI

When run in stand-alone mode, Vue 6 xStream performs exactly like Vue 6 Infinite. The features described in this page are identical to Vue 6 Infinite.

New in Release 6.5

Release 6.5 of Vue adds a number of breakthrough features to an already long list:

• Create skies with as many overlapping spectral cloud layers as you like for complex and unbelievably realistic cloudscapes!
   
• Revolutionary new cloud lighting technology that lets local lights affect spectral atmospheres and clouds (as below)!
  Create true-to-life thunder storms, search lights or illuminated fly through clouds.
   
• Render spectral atmosphere animations significantly faster thanks to the optimized spectral atmosphere anti-flickering technology!
   
• Render very high resolution images over a network of computers!

Take Control

With the animation graph editor, you can now animate the way you are used to, with full control over keyframes, time-curves, tangents and interpolation.

Interactively paint EcoSystems Generation II directly over surfaces with pressure-sensitive tablets, create stacks of layered EcoSystems, change size and color on the fly and control everything, down to individual instances.

Create special wind effects with the directional and omni ventilators. Produce flicker free animations thanks to the revolutionary new SolidGrowth 4 plant rendering technology.

Save Time

Efficiently manage complex mixed materials with the new Photoshop-style layers.

Quickly browse through the shader tree and easily control alpha channels and color selections. Use the new user definable anti-aliasing strategies to get smoother results faster. Take advantage of the new radiosity engine to produce significantly faster renders of both indoor and outdoor scenes.

Enjoy better memory management, a native 64 bit architecture and improved efficiency in managing large scale scenes.

Feel at Home

Are you used to Maya-style transform manipulators? Do you prefer Y as the up axis? Do you press R or S to scale? We know that, as you integrate Vue 6 into your existing toolkit, the last thing you want is to waste time finding your way around.

This is why, when you first launch Vue, it asks you which 3D program you are accustomed to, and automatically adjusts the interface to make you feel at home, whether you are a Max, LightWave, Cinema4D, XSI or Maya person. Vue will even match the color scheme to that of your favorite app! Of course, you can customize the interface (keyboard shortcuts, manipulators, etc).

E-on's revolutionary EcoSystems, "One of the greatest technological advances in many a year" (3D World magazine) is taking yet another leap. With full interactivity and precise control, EcoSystems Generation II will revolutionize the way you create animations, architectural renders, matte paintings or landscape design.

Full Interactivity

You can now paint EcoSystems directly onto the surface of objects. Use pressure sensitive tablets to control any parameter as you paint. Add, remove, and change color or size of EcoSystems on the fly, paint-select individual instances (or groups of instances) and move/resize/rotate them directly, convert instances to real objects, and put them back into the EcoSystem later.

Precise Control

A single EcoSystem can have multiple layers, each layer with its own complete set of parameters, for easy control of separate populations. The new affinity setting allows control of one layer by another (e.g. place grass only around trees).

Choose from 7 EcoSystem display modes, from boxes to real geometry, with optional dynamic LOD.

Animation

New Animation Graph Editor

Animation workflow in Vue 6 is drastically improved with a fully re-designed animation graph editor. You can now adjust time curves and keyframes, with precise control over independent keyframe coordinates, tangents and interpolation, and render animations in OpenGL for ultra fast previews.

Local Wind Generators

The directional and omni ventilator let you apply local wind effects to plants, and can be moved around or linked to other objects in the scene. These wind generators greatly expand the possibilities of using Vue's realistic SolidGrowth wind reaction.

Rendering

Spectral Atmosphere Engine

Based entirely on real-world atmospheric behavior, the new spectral engine produces ultra-realistic environments with volumetric clouds, accurate light dispersion and natural phenomena such as Godrays. Control the air density, humidity, dust, aerial perspective, overall turbidity and more to create a plethora of atmospheric conditions.

Spectral Clouds and MetaClouds

The highly optimized volumetric cloud layers let you create convincing fly-throughs or simulate realistic low-lying fog with mountains peaking through.

MetaClouds are stand alone volumetric clouds that can be freely moved around. Choose from a library of preset cloud models to generate clouds that are different each time. Edit the shape of the clouds and combine them to create elaborate formations.

Flicker-Free EcoSystem Rendering Technology

Vue Infinite's unique ability to animate distant forests or jungles comes at a cost: it's a tough challenge for the render engine to handle the massive number of moving polygons for each pixel. This often results in graininess or flickering. The revolutionary new SolidGrowth 4 technology significantly reduces the flickering of distant plants, and produces much smoother renders of even the most tree-heavy scenes.

Faster Renders - More Control

New anti-aliasing strategies and five anti-aliasing models provide extended control over the look of the final render. The radiosity engine has been entirely rewritten to accurately simulate indoor lighting and renders up to 4 times faster; ray-traced soft shadows are more efficient, with more user control and smoother results. The overall rendering speed has been increased by up to 130%.

Radiosity

SubSurface scattering

Displacement

• Absorption and multiple internal scattering
• Large amplitude displacement mapping
• Ambient occlusion
• Multi-shape area lights
• Dynamic mesh subdivision
• New fast radiosity engine optimized for both indoor and outdoor Scenes
• Automatic Exposure and Natural Film Response
• Post-render processing
• 16 bit image support, including Z-Brush compatible displacement

Materials and Terrains

Layered Materials

Vue 6 provides a new and convenient way to design and control highly complex mixed materials. Layers of materials are added Photoshop-style (e.g. add a layer of rust to a metal shader). Each layer has its own complete set of parameters and independent reaction to altitude, slope and orientation, as well as its own alpha channel.

All layers are accessible via a single window that makes browsing through the shader hierarchy a breeze.

New Terrain Preset and Erosion Types

Three new erosion effects have been added: alluvium and dissolve effects simulate the highly complex process of water erosion and the way sedimentary rock deposits are created. Glaciation produces erosion on lower slopes only. The new peak terrain preset generates sharp-ridged young mountains. Bitmaps can now be used to define the shape of the brushes.

• New volumetric shaders with internal color and self-shadowing
• HyperTextures (solid volumetric)
• New texture mapping modes: Once, Repeat and Mirror independently along X and Y
• Add names and comments to SmartGraph nodes
• Edit the alpha channel directly inside the color map editor
• Material highlighting
• Texture spooling to handle extremely large texture maps

Production

Standalone Renderer

Vue 6 features a standalone renderer that can render images in the background while you continue working on the scene. Since the standalone renderer doesn't need to carry the overhead of a visual interface, it is able to dedicate more memory to the rendering.

The standalone renderer can either handle rendering on your system, or distribute rendering accross a network of RenderCows™.

On top of the existing RenderCow™ network rendering system, Vue 6 offers a new type of optional standalone render node, the RenderBull™.

The RenderBull is a command-line renderer designed to become part of larger renderfarm management tools such as BackBurner.

Floating Licenses

Vue 6 xStream and are available with both node-locked licenses (the program will only operate on the computer for which it is registered) or with floating licenses (the product can be installed on as many computers as you want, and licenses are handed out by the License Server on demand).

Floating Licenses are managed using the e-on License Server application, which you can use to add new licenses or monitor licenses in use.

Additional New Production Features

• Enhanced RenderCow network rendering
• Render jobs can be easily batched using the Batch Rendering interface

Improved Memory Management
 

Texture Virtualization

Vue 6 can efficiently handle very large texture maps that would not fit into your physical RAM. Thanks to virtualization, texture maps are automatically loaded/unloaded from RAM and only the part of the texture map being used at a given time is actually stored in memory. This lets you use more of the 2GB maximum addressable memory* for other tasks.

Geometry Virtualization

When Vue 6 needs to handle complex scenes with lots of meshes and high poly counts, it automatically moves unused datasets to and from the hard drive as they are needed; only the geometry that is used at a given time is stored in RAM. Just like texture virtualization, this lets you take your scenes way beyond the 2GB limit.

Purge Memory

The purge memory command lets you clean up the application's memory at any time, without sacrificing undo performance or losing any data. Memory purging will also help avoid memory fragmentation.

*Win32 can only access 2GB per process.
This limitation does not exist under XP64.

Interface and Workflow

Inter Operability

• Import motion tracking information (MatchMover, Boujou, SynthEyes)
• Export animations as AfterEffects
• Ability to save and retrieve the output files of the synchronization plugins
• Customizable transform manipulators
• Customizable interface colors
• Ability to change the axes and order of rotations

• Ability to merge scenes
• Perspective camera view
• Ability to place an image in the back of the views for reference
• Add a background image or animation to the camera
• Automatic handling and referencing of duplicated objects
• Improved memory management for duplicated objects
• Recursive searching of texture maps in search folders
• If you open the editor of an object, switching to a different type of object will automatically switch to that object's editor
• Non-modal visual browsers can stay open while you work
• Drag & drop objects, materials, etc. from browsers to your scene

• The interactive alignment tool lets you align objects along X, Y and Z axes simultaneously
• The smart drop feature will attempt to drop objects "naturally" on the surface of other objects
• A quick array tool for fast multi-duplication with inherited transforms
• Quick color selection tool