Using 3D landscape programmes

Vue Infinite is a complex little beast of a programme which can be picked up in a very short space of time. Over the years this programme (from eon software) has gone from strength to strength and, as their own website shows, been used for some very complex and professional image production. The latest version is called Vue Infinite and features a new ecosystem modelling section. Using this you can take a palm tree and have it populate the surface of a chosen terrain automatically. And not just that, it will also allow you customise the ecosystem so that you can do things such as drop off/increase in density of objects near other objects, multiple ecosystem members, increase or decrease in the size and density of the objects. So, what else? Well the same ecosystem section can be used to populate cities, highways, pedestrian walkways with ther relevant objects (buildings, cars, people). Obviously the greater the selection of objects of one type that you have, the greater the variety of the final image. Highly complex but so simple to use the main danger of the ecosystem is overkill. We all think that generating a forest is cool, but to generate a thick forest filled with a dozen species of tree and bush under a volumetric sky is going to be a big cpu and ram job. The ability to populate a scene with thousands of trees (each with leaves and branches which must be modelled) will lead to billions of polygons and will be a long hard wait for the render. (If you run anywhere around 3000 + with 1 GB of RAM then expect times ranging from 5 minutes to 15 hours depending on the size, quality and complexity of the images.)

The above image was created by Ninzen, resident Bogglia artist using the ecosystem model on a fairly low complexity setting.

This picture was created to show the ways in which Vue Infinite can be used for more than just terrain generation. Elements in here include the use of photographic images, text, volumetric atmosphere and city models as well as a basic room set up.

So, is Vue Infinite a good programme?

In our view, its fast and easy to learn (if a little more complex compared to Cinema 4D) and with new text and ecosystem features as well as a strong rendering engine it will be the perfect entry level programme which can also do very professional work as well. In terms of price, well Bryce is cheaper but then you can also get a stripped down version of Vue Infinite called Vue Easel which will do much of what the full version does, with the expected restrictions on some aspects.

Vue Infinite

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