Real World Computing

Many of Vue Easel's materials simulate vegetation such as grass or trees in the distance, but you'll also want to add some fully rendered plants in close-up - a major challenge in 3D where every single branch, twig and leaf adds to the polygon count. Vue Easel makes handling vegetation simple, although the behind-the-scenes processing involved is formidable: right-click the Plant tool and select one of 52 SolidGrowth presets, then left-click to add randomly generated variations ready for positioning. To quickly create a whole wood from a single tree, use Scatter/Replicate to randomly generate variants and then drag them up into the sky before using Drop Object command to position them on your terrain.

With sky, ground and plants in place, your landscape is starting to look the part, so now you can bring it to life by populating it with objects and figures. Vue Easel provides a range of preset objects that you can import, or create your own from 3D primitives such as spheres, cubes and advanced text handling. Such custom objects can then be combined using Boolean operations or else converted to organic metablobs. While such built-in modelling can be handy, Vue Easel can't compete with dedicated modelling software, but it can import textured objects from any third-party application that can export in the popular OBJ format.

Besides OBJ, Vue Easel supports just one other import format called PZ3. While comparatively little known, this is the native format of e frontier's popular Poser, so you can directly load naturalistic Poser-created human and animal figures into your scene with full support for dynamic hair and cloth (as well as the Poser shader tree). You can even repose such figures from within Vue, but using dials rather than direct manipulation, so it's usually easier to make changes in Poser and reimport. Poser and Vue Easel working together in this way offer a low-cost and simple-to-use combination that can create scenes and figures of a realism that outstrip most expensive high-end modelling apps.

You're now ready to render your scene, and Vue 6 Easel provides three levels of render quality. It supports dual-core processors and can output static images of up to 5 megapixels (the trial version is limited to 640 x 480) ready for export as BMP or JPEG. You're not limited to static images, as you can quickly set up camera-based animations using the Animation wizard that offers various modes such as helicopter, pedestrian and automobile, then lets you draw an animation track on the top view of your scene, set its duration and so on: if you're happy with the in-wizard, real-time preview, just click Finish and your animation appears as keyframes on Vue Easel's simple Timeline. Click the Timeline's Render Animation command, set the frame size (up to 720 pixels wide) and the number of frames per second, and then export in AVI or MOV format.

Esprit/Studio Pro/Infinite

Vue Easel offers extraordinary power for the price, but e-on has plenty more to offer in Vue Esprit, at $199, which adds extra functions in all of Easel's core areas. These include the ability to handle individual volumetric metaclouds in the Atmosphere Editor and support for procedural terrains, so that when you zoom into a scene more surface detail appears. Lighting is enhanced by support for local area lights and global radiosity, while Esprit's rendering engine offers a wider range of preset qualities and camera and object-based animations (including atmospheres) up to 1,600 pixels wide, while static images are limited only by your system memory. Export formats are also extended to encompass TIFF, PNG and MPEG, while new import formats include EPS, 3DS, DXF and LWO, with Poser PZ3 support extended to animated figures.

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