Jungle fever

When you think of a jungle, the first things that come to mind are trees. Lots of trees. But there aren’t many sane people out there who’d be willing to sit down and manually place each of the million or so 3D trees that make up this scene. And this is where Vue 5 Infinite comes in. 

This application from e-on Software creates and animates natural 3D scenery. Like its predecessor, Vue 4 Pro, this recently released version offers an extensive set of integration, compositing and synchronisation tools specifically geared toward the professional user. This increased flexibility makes Vue 5 Infinite especially attractive for animators, architects, matte painters and visualisation artists who need to add detailed and realistic natural 3D environments to their productions. 

Vue 5 Infinite is packed full with new features. Highlights include a newly designed render engine with GI, radiosity and image-based lighting, deep-level shader customisation, SmartGraph function editor, procedural terrains with infinite level of detail and a full-featured multi-pass renderer with Photoshop export. 

But back to those trees. With the help of Vue 5 Infinite’s indispensable EcoSystems feature (an object duplication and placement system), this gargantuan task is diminished to no more than a few mouse clicks. Moreover, as you progress through the tutorial, you’ll notice the polygon count grows at an alarming rate (the final scene contains around 3 billion polygons). While most 3D programs will slow down to a crawl trying to cope with such a high poly count, Vue 5 Infinite happily goes about its business. 

In addition to working with EcoSystems, you’ll also create and edit procedural terrains, fine-tune the atmosphere, work out the lighting, do some texturing and even get a feel of the new function graph editor. If you’ve worked with other versions of Vue, you’ll find your way easily in this walkthrough. If not then you might want to do the kick-start tutorial (in the Help section of the demo) first.

Click here to download the Vue 5 Infinite demo from e-on's site