The great news has been spreading rapidly among Vue users; Vue 10 is going to be available for every user in a few weeks! The pre-release version is already out for maintenance users; I am among those lucky ones who have been playing with it for a while. To summarize my first impressions; Vue 10 is a version worth upgrading to. Ever since my Vue era (since Vue 6), I think Vue 10 is one of the greatest upgrades, with lots of ground-breaking new features:
- Spline and Road Tools
- Dynamic Rocks
- Water Shading Engine and Physical Transparency
- Render Comparison
- EcoSystem Phase and Lean-out Control (for animation)
- Terrain Editing Improvements
- Edge-based Anti-Aliasing
- Improved Depth of Field and Motion Blur
- Up to 30% Faster Rendering Speed
Although I couldn’t check all the new features yet; those ones I’ve tried brought some nice results. You can read about every new feature in details in e-on software’s latest
newsletter; in this post I would share my first experiences regarding those features I’ve tried.
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Spline and road tools
The serpentine road in the scene above was made using the
Spline tool. Since Vue is the only tool I’ve used so far, this was the first time I met spline, and it was totally unfamiliar. It took a while to find out how it works, but once you understand it, nothing can stop you.
Spline is a geometry-based toolkit that enables you to create roads, paths, rivers, ecosystems or even objects, without needing to create terrain or density maps. You can determine the spline’s path, shape and width, and – the best of it all – you can also enable its influence on terrains. This means that the terrain shape gets automatically adjusted to the spline. If the spline is under the terrain’s surface, the surface right under the spline sinks. If i’s above the surface, it rises. And you can also determine the width of the area that adjusts to the spline. Vue 10 ships with several road, railroad and railway support materials for splines. Another new tool to make things easier!
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Dynamic rocks
The rocks in the scene above are not imported rocks and not custom materials. Say goodbye to the old, low-quality rock with that awful “chipped” material;
Vue 10 ships with a whole library of new, dynamic rocks! The library contains many high-res and low-res rocks, each with different shape, size and material. You can find everything here from small pebbles to river rocks, broken rocks, eroded rocks, cracked rocks, building rocks; rocks for any type of scene. With multiple layers of rocks and pebbles, very realistic rock ecosystems can be created. Another big step forward!
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Water Shading Engine and Physical Transparency
This is not my first underwater scene. But the first one where I used only one light, the sunlight….without light gel. Realistic underwater scenes were famous for their difficulty to create. It was possible only by faking depth with atmosphere tweaks, adding extra spotlight to create underwater rays, using caustics light gel to achieve more elaborate rays and – fake – caustics, many-many tweaks.
Vue 10 comes with a new physical water model (which is also applied on the default water). This model is based on physically accurate subsurface scattering. You can control the depth of the absorption, the color of absorption and scattering (as before), and the anisotropy. The deeper the absorption is, the deeper the sunlight reaches. The higher the anisotropy value is, the wider the light scatters, the brighter the rays are, the brighter the scene is. You also have the option to boost the quality. There are 3 types of physical water models; Fast Ambient, Fast Ocean, and the no-so-fast Accurate.
As I mentioned, there’s no need to enable light gel anymore; you can enable caustics in Vue 10′s water editor, and you can control its size, intensity and sharpness.
These effects work the best when displaced water surface is enabled.
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Render Comparison is another very useful tool; it offers you the option to stack every render and save them one after the other, for further comparison. This feature works well if you render to screen; you can find all the stacked renders below the main render window, and whenever a render is finished (or aborted), you can stack it and also check the previous ones, with just one click. This makes it easier to compare different renders easily, and find the best settings for your scene.
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Up to 30% Faster Rendering Speed - I can verify this. The Vue 9 scenes I loaded were actually rendered faster, due to the significant internal optimizations made by e-on.
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These were the features I’ve tried so far; I am very satisfied so far with Vue 10, and I’m looking forward to exploring it even more. Well done, e-on!
