Vue Infinite 5.0

Vue Infinite isn’t a standard 3D modelling app, but with it you can build complex, photorealistic 3D landscapes, fast. This latest release offers many new features that will appeal to professionals, not least hassle-free integration with many leading 3D applications.

The most impressive new feature is EcoSystem, which enables you to populate any terrain with millions of plants, rocks or objects. Within minutes, you can create a mountain landscape that’s covered in trees, or a vast cityscape with hundreds of thousands of buildings. Any surface can then be strewn with a variety of rocks, plants, and even cars. The potential of EcoSystem is massive, and it’s surprisingly easy to use.

By applying EcoSystems to selected objects, you can control where trees, rocks or buildings fall, too. You also retain control of size, size variation, colour, distribution and orientation, so you can leave the process entirely automatic (which is ideal for distant horizons), or adjust EcoSystems in the foreground until things look as you want them to.

All plants can be set to animate automatically, blowing in a breeze or bending in the wind. You’d have to be an expert to attempt this in a major 3D app; Vue Infinite enables newbies to create such scenes with ease.

One of Vue’s greatest strengths has always been its atmospheric modelling, and Vue Infinite’s Global Illumination takes this a step further. If you park a bright red car next to a white wall, for example, some of the car’s red glow will be reflected. The effect is subtle, but noticeable in 3D renders when absent. Global Illumination makes sure that light bounces around in a realistic way, and although this pushes render times up, the feature will bring superb realism to your Vue images.

Textures and terrains can now be animated over time, too, so that smoke, water and even plants change during a shot. You can make a forest grow, smoke billow or water swell as your camera flies over.

The main interface remains pretty simple to navigate, although some buttons are tiny. Camera animation can also be fiddly and generate unpredictable results, even when using the app’s Animation Wizard.

Vue encourages you to create landscapes with tens of billions of polygons – when you render an animation with motion blurring and Global Illumination, that’s always going to take time to output, even if you have your own render farm. It would be unfair, however, to think of Vue as slow. Used well, it handles renders efficiently, and can even turn your old computers into Render-Cows, to share the processing workload over a basic network. A huge improvement is Vue’s ability to Bake illumination before animating, which makes rendering faster than ever.

Stability, however, is a problem. Although the interface is snappy, once you build complex scenes it starts to lag. And the more complex your scene, the more likely you are to experience a crash (still, if that does happen, at least Vue autosaves your work). While pro software shouldn’t be this temperamental, clever users will no doubt find their own workarounds in time. Updates are also on their way.

Tell us what you think of this product on the forum: http://forum.computerarts.co.uk