Defence Vendor E-On E-On Vue 3D Superhero

The Standalone Solution

Vue 10 is the most efficient and advanced solution for creating, animating and rendering natural 3D environments.

It offers a high-end 3D scenery solution for SFX studios, animators, illustrators, architects, matte painters and CG professionals. It is strongly focused on power, productivity and inter-operability with existing toolkits.

Vue 10 naturally integrates and extends all major 3D applications to provide a complete, professional natural 3D studio.

Specifically designed for professionals, it combines a multitude of cutting-edge features that easily integrate with your workflow.

With its intuitive, production-oriented layout, you will quickly enhance your production with rich EcoSystems™ of wind-swept trees and plants, Spectral atmospheres and detailed terrains in fully animated scenes.

Among other significant advances, this new release introduces a number of major enhancements, including:

·         Spline and road tools

·         New rock technology

·         Streamlined terrain editing

·         A physical water shading engine

·         Significant improvements in overall rendering performance and artistic control

Natural Scenery Creation

Splines - A spline is a new editable object that can be used for EcoSystem effects, terrain effects, roads and object creation. The spline is created by defining points that are joined to create the shape. Vue 10 includes a comprehensive spline toolkit that allows you to add, delete or move spline points, configure tangents, apply various effects such as EcoSystem effects or Geometry effects, and more. Vue's splines can also be automatically aligned at the surface of terrains.

EcoSystem Effects - Use EcoSystem effects to populate EcoSystems along a spline and in the area defined by a spline. You can also use a spline as an EcoSystem mask to erase other EcoSystem instances.

Geometry Effect - Use Geometry effects to extrude a defined geometry along a spline. The spline editor gives you access to several geometry properties such as profile presets, profile dimensions, profile dimension ratio along the spline, material, twist (mode and limit), and more...

Terrain Effect - Use Terrain Effects to engrave or emboss the surface of a terrain following a predefined path. This feature is particularly useful to create road beds or raised highways.

Automatic Path Finding - The new spline tool includes an automatic path finder that calculates the optimum route in between your spline keys based on a realistic slope. The distance in between each new spline key is user definable. The automatic path finder tool is ideal to create twisting roads on a mountain slope, for instance, or more generally to create roads that would realistically be suitable for vehicles or pedestrians.

Spline Import - You can import a 2D vector graphic file to create Vue splines. If the file defines multiple curves, Vue will automatically add multiple splines.

Host Application Splines - When using the xStream in integrated mode, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D or Softimage* splines can be used exactly as Vue splines: they are converted internally and appear in the xStream World Browser in a "Native Splines" layer. You can use these splines with the Vue tools to add EcoSystems, terrain effects or geometry - exactly like in Vue standalone mode.

Editing the spline is done using your native application tools. If you load an existing Vue scene which already has splines, these splines will be converted into native splines. They can be edited with the native tools, and the modifications you make will be automatically back-ported to the original Vue spline, and any attached Terrain/EcoSystem/Geometry effect(s) will be updated accordingly.

* Not possible in LightWave, due to SDK limitations.

Road Tools
Based on the brand new Spline technology, Vue 10 offers a built in Road construction tool that allows you to directly draw a road path on your terrains. The resulting spline is automatically textured with an asphalt material, and carves or raises the terrain surface to adjust it to your path.

Vue 10 also ships with specific spline content composed of 3 predefined spline-based materials (road, train track, and track support structure), 2 python programs for adjusting splines (to lay flat on terrains), and tutorial files showing how to use splines to carve tunnels and create a railroad track.

Rocks
Standalone Rocks - Vue 10 features a library of dynamic rock templates that can be used to instantly create single rocks, groups of rocks, or use them in EcoSystems. Each time you create a rock from a template, a new and unique variation will be generated.

Rock EcoSystems - You can use the new rock technology to populate your EcoSystems or interactively scatter rocks into your scenes. Simply add new rock templates to your EcoSystem or EcoPainter tools by drag-dropping the rock templates to your EcoSystem population list. For added realism, each rock type used in an EcoSystem automatically generates variations - just like e-on's SolidGrowth plants.

New Parametric Rock Materials - These new dynamic rock templates contain unique, parametrically defined materials that are completely user controllable. Colour, bump, highlights, and EcoSystem variations are easily adjustable to create any desired appearance.

Physical Water
Vue 10 introduces a brand new - physically accurate - Water shading engine.

Vue 10 physical water adds absorption and scattering parameters to allow for realistic light absorption in the body of water.

Light now interacts accurately with ocean waves to produce realistic underwater caustics: underwater light will be more concentrated in some areas, while other areas receive less light. The deeper you go, the darker it gets - as in the real world!

For added artistic control, you can adjust the focusing of caustics so that they appear at their maximum sharpness at a specific depth.

Visible shafts of underwater light can also be created very easily.

Terrain Technologies
Terrain modelling is an area of active R&D at e-on as we continue to improve Vue's powerful terrain technologies in response to user feedback.

Previewing of Environment Constraints - When brushing a layer with altitude, slope or orientation constraints, it is now possible to preview these constraints directly, so that the areas where the brush will have an effect appear clearly.

Terrain Brush Improvements - Brushes in Vue 10 can act only on certain levels of details, while leaving others untouched, so you can modify the general shape of a terrain without removing smaller details.

3D Painting Undo brush: The undo brush now also works in 3D.

New Custom 3D brush: This brush lets you define a specific direction for the displacement applied to the terrain surface.

Mask Rotation - You can now optionally enable mask rotation when painting in the terrain editor. When mask rotation is enabled, the mask will rotate together with the view allowing precise control when painting materials or painting geometry in the terrain editor (ideal for footprints!).

Advanced Layering - Vue 10's terrain editor introduces fully additive material layering. This new system preserves the original alpha presence of layers, lets you paint multiple layers simultaneously and painting one layer no longer affects underlying layers. Layers are combined in the function graph using a 'Layer Painting' metanode.

For instance you can now easily erase parts of a snow material layer to have an underlying grass material appear only where you want.

New Strata3D Node - The new Strata3D noise node is ideal for creating realistic canyon walls and stratified rock formations. This node works in conjunction with all other fractal and noise patterns.

Other Terrain Editor Improvements

·         You can now limit the maximum amount of painting in the terrain editor.

·         Non airbrush mode for 3D painting works like 2D effects.

·         The brush map images in the terrain editor can be inverted.

·         Terrain altitude colour map can be mapped to the visible range of altitudes.

·         Terrain effect buttons can be set to repeat a given number of times automatically.

·         You can manually set the Level of Detail (LOD) for swifter painting in 3D.

·         You can now refresh the OpenGL preview of terrains with the click of a button.

Cyclic Noises & Fractals

New cyclic noises and fractals provide powerful capabilities to generate patterns that repeat seamlessly, in space or time (for instance, for that perfectly looping water animation effect)! You can control the cycle rate along each axis to produce truly amazing patterns.

EcoSystem Improvements

EcoSystem Phase Control - Vue 10 lets you individually control the phase (animation offset) of animated elements inside your EcoSystem populations. Thanks to new advances in the EcoSystem technology, Vue can now automatically add phase variations on top the geometrical and material variations that are present in SolidGrowth-based EcoSystems.

You can fully control this phase on a per instance basis, using the function graph. This is ideal for creating waves of wind blowing across fields of grass, or violent explosions that blow out surrounding trees.

This new ability to control animated instances on an individual basis is not limited to SolidGrowth plants. You can control any type of animated object, including pre-animated meshes (e.g. to create crowds of people that don't all walk together).

EcoSystem Lean-Out Control - This new feature allows you to control how the EcoSystem instances lean out at the border of an EcoSystem. This is ideal for capturing the way plants compete for light. It's also a simple way of making grass lean over a sidewalk, for example.

Other EcoSystem Improvements - When loading an EcoSystem layer, it will now be added to the underlying material instead of being loaded with a transparent sub-material.

Precise Artistic Control and Ease of Us
Render Stack with Comparison Tools
Vue 10 features a new powerful render comparison tool that will allow you to easily stack your renders, test various post processes on the same image without losing any information, and compare them using easy to use and intuitive visual tools.
New Render Display Dialog - The render display was redesigned to improve workflow. You can now interactively pan and zoom in and out of the render - even as it is being computed.
Render Stack - Vue 10 automatically stacks renders so you can keep track of all your previous renders. Renders are saved to disk, together with all alpha, depth, G-Buffer, Multi-pass, relighting and diagnosis passes, and instantly available in the stack. You can either set Vue to stack renders automatically, or stack them on demand only. The size of the stack on your hard drive is fully controllable.
Render Comparison Tool - You can easily compare different versions of a render using the render comparison tool. Simply pick two images and compare them using the "follow-me" separator that automatically follows the mouse as you move over the render display. Zoom in as you compare two renders to analyse fine details. Use the Difference tool to show differences between renders; Dynamically exaggerate differences with the difference boost for easier spotting.
Lightweight Clones - Easily test different post-processing options using clones, without affecting the source image. Clones simply duplicate all post-processing options (including Relighting information!) while keeping the other buffers untouched.

Physical Transparency
Fully transparent materials don't actually exist in nature: Since they are made from particles of matter, light will interact with these particles as it travels through the transparent medium. Vue 10 offers a physical transparency model that will accurately reproduce this phenomenon by simulating volumetric light scattering and absorption through transparent media. This is particularly useful for example, for the simulation of realistic glass (as illustrated in the opposite picture).

Improved Highlights
The rendering of highlights in combination with global illumination is dramatically improved by better accounting for the interaction of illumination with bumps at the surface of objects.

Image Combiner/Sampler Nodes
The Image Combiner Node, used in conjunction with the Image Sampler (and Multi-Image Sampler) nodes allow you to combine several projected texture maps to create various effects (e.g. create a sandstone material by combining a rock texture with a sand texture).

Texture Projection Mapping Improvements
You can now select the mapping mode for all Projected Texture Maps independently from the general material mapping mode, allowing the creation of very complex materials. This new parameter is also available for the Projected Animation Map node. For instance, in one single material, you can have a Projected Texture Map for the Color channel set to World Parametric and a second Projected Texture Map used for displacement set to Object Standard.

Other Improvements in Artistic Control and Ease of Use

·         Point lights are now able to create dark shadows even in Environment Mapping mode.

·         Cloud layer zones are now accessible directly through the host application.

·         The alpha channel can now be edited for mixed materials.

·         Vue now supports morph targets when importing Daz Collada files.

·         A new "From main view" aspect ratio is now available in the render options (to render to screen using the same aspect ratio as the main view).

·         When you drag-drop objects into your scene, the objects will be placed at the position of the mouse cursor.

·         You can now drag and drop bitmaps directly into the 4 views and in the material editor.

·         You can now set an animation preview to loop.

·         The EcoPainter dialog can now be folded to a more compact version.

·         It is now possible to select the slot into which a material snapshot will be saved.

·         The scatter/replicate dialog now remembers previously entered parameters, which can easily be restored.

·         You can now turn on and off various settings of the atmosphere preview (such as lens flares, planets, clouds, etc) directly via the application menu.

·         You can move the render display dialog while Vue is rendering.

·         Altitude Node now handles Object height unit.

·         When rendering with radiosity, Vue will warn you if there are any luminous materials in the scene.

·         You can now save a deformed mesh (without animation) by simply selecting and saving the sub-object.

·         Import settings are preserved when importing multiple objects of the same type.

·         You can control the strength of normal maps.

·         Move Infinite terrains using the manipulation gizmos.

·         You can now replace multiple objects simultaneously.

Improved Performance
Faster Rendering! Thanks to dramatic changes in the structure of internal scene processing, typical render times are up to 30% faster.
Edge-Based Anti-Aliasing - A new edge-based anti-aliasing algorithm was added to complement the previous colour-based anti-al