In 3D software, a terrain is mostly built by painstakingly creating terrain, ecological systems, atmosphere, etc. Creating a planet is usually done by making a sphere and adding a texture to it. But what happens when one wants to fly over the terrain or the planet? Right, it falls apart because there's nothing dynamic about the thing. Vue 7.5 allows 3D artists to create dynamically updating terrain, growth, planets, and even oceans.
It’s not easy to do it, but you can create a planet complete with plants,trees, oceans and other dynamic stuff on the surface. It’s not easy because it does involve Vue’s graph driven ‘programming’, but if you learn that visual language, it can be done in a couple of hours.
Vue calls planetary nature “spherical terrains”. I tried to build the tutorial terrain, and while the tutorial is far from complete in how you must go about, I succeeded in building the planet in just under an hour. Given that about everything in Vue behaves different when one is creating a planet, that’s amazingly fast in my opinion.
Another new feature in Vue 7.5 is the ability to paint materials on terrains. At first I thought this wasn’t new, but the new painting mode allows for mixed material painting, and that’s certainly new. It also saves time and gives the artist a better impression of the final result of his work.
In the same league, animated EcoSystem Population lets you literally have living woods, tress, plants, etc in your scene. Colour, density, scale… it can all be made to change over time. This new feature takes some hefty computer power, as the population is recomputed with every frame.
To ease the load, there is now the ability to apply camera mapping. Instead of drawing a background for each frame when rendering, for example, you can now instruct Vue to only draw a bitmap of the background that is then projected onto the camera, taking up much less processing power.
More exciting new stuff are the shadow casting of clouds on clouds and the lighting and atmospheric effects that can be overridden on a per material basis.
Vue 7 was a giant upgrade, but Vue 7.5 is even bigger if you ask me. The need to read the manual has just grown more important again.
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