RECOMMENDED

VERDICT: Major enhancements to atmospheric and lighting models, import support, rendering options and material and EcoSystem handling.

Creating naturalistic real world scenes is one of the most difficult tasks for a 3D modeller which is where Vue Infinite comes in with its dedicated state-of-the-art capabilities.

Vue 6 Infinite is designed to work alongside your object modeller of choice and so when you first launch the program it asks which 3D program you are accustomed to and automatically adjusts its interface accordingly in terms of colours and shortcuts. This feeling of familiarity is further boosted by Vue 6 Infinite’s inclusion of the now almost ubiquitous Gizmo on-object manipulators for handling positioning, scaling and rotation. Other interface enhancements include a new Library tab in the World Browser in which you can view objects used several times (these are now stored only once in memory), view and quick render shortcuts, easier copying, dropping and renaming of objects and numerous other tweaks. To be honest I’d prefer it if the main modelling applications worked more like Vue Infinite rather than the other way around.
The first step in creating your scene is to select an atmosphere for it. Vue 6 Infinite now offers over 180 presets to choose from, based on four main atmospheric models. The main advantage of the new Spectral model is that it is based on the balance of air, dust and water particles that make up the atmosphere enabling greater realism. It also means that you can add true 3-dimensional spectral cloud layers, whether ground fog or soaring cumulonimbus. You can even add and edit individual procedurally-generated metaclouds.

6 Infinite offers new more realistic spectral atmospheric handling

After the sky, you need to take care of the ground. Vue 6 Infinite’s newly resizable Terrain Editor now offers eight preset terrain styles and seven erosion types including glaciation, alluvium and dissolve effects. There’s also a new option to blend procedural terrains with bitmaps and you can customize your brush for interactive editing. For ground cover, Vue’s new SolidGrowth 4 technology offers the same 50+ fully customisable plant species, but these have now been optimised to avoid undesirable flickering in the distance during breeze-based animation. You can also now add new Ventilator objects to locally control the effect of wind on vegetation.