Vue 10.5 xStream - The Integrated Solution

Vue xStream offers professional CG artists a complete toolset for creating and
rendering exceptionally rich and realistic natural environments in 3ds Max, Maya,
LightWave, Cinema 4D and Softimage.

Access all the power of the world's leading 3D Digital Nature solution directly from
within your favorite application. Create and edit beautifully detailed natural environments
using your application's standard manipulators.

Render everything together inside 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema 4D or Softimage,
with full interaction between Vue and native elements, including 2-way mutual
shadow casting, reflection, refraction and GI.

Vue 10.5 xStream - Overview

Full Support of All Vue Elements

You can create Vue environments directly in the host application, or you can load
ready-made environments that were designed on a stand-alone version of Vue
(Vue Infinite, or Vue 10.5 xStream running in stand-alone mode - xStream can run
either as a plug-in or as a stand-alone application).

All components of the Vue environments are supported by Vue 10.5 xStream,
including complete EcoSystems,all types of atmospheres, cameras, lighting,
all plants, all terrain types and all procedural materials.

Animated scenes are also supported, including wind animations

for plants and EcoSystems, atmosphere and cloud animations,
and all animated materials.

All imported meshes included in the Vue scene will be loaded as well.

Lights are automatically converted into their
Maya/Max/LightWave/Cinema/Softimage counterparts,
and the atmosphere is converted into a special environment shader.

Vue 10.5 xStream - Terrains

Sculpt 3D Terrains in Real-Time3D Sculpt Procedural Terrains

Combine the best of both worlds with the ability to locally sculpt features
on finite and infinite procedural terrains.

Let Vue automatically generate infinitely detailed expanses of terrain,
then fine tune or completely rework localized areas of the terrain to suit your requirements.
Touch up zones can be nested to provide unlimited artistic control.

Sculpt in roads, paths, and caverns while perserving the procedural details
around the localized features.

You can also create standalone painting masks that are not connected to any specific material,
to precisely control sculpting and distribution of materials over the surface of your terrains.


The global Freeze mask can also be used to accurately control your modifications.
The Freeze mask can be used in combination with all other masks.

Vue 10.5 xStream - Lighting

Feature-Rich Direct Illumination

Planar and Multi-shape Area Lights

In addition to point, spot and directional lights, Vue offers two types of area lights:
planar and multi-shape.
The latter lets you convert any mesh into an area light with a simple mouse click.
This greatly enhances Infinite’s indoor lighting capabilities, making it possible to create
any type of light fixture, in any shape.

Optimized Raytraced Soft Shadows

For optimal quality/time ratio, Vue offers full custom control over the production
of raytraced shadows, with separate settings for optimization, quality,
blurring and traced shadow rays.

These strategies produce extremely smooth, non-grainy soft shadows.

AccuShadows™ Soft Shadow Mapping

As an alternative to raytraced shadows, AccuShadows™ creates fast soft shadows
using shadow maps, giving you full control over map size, quality,
sampling level and filter bias.
The softness of mapped shadows can be light-based, object-based or constant.

Light Effects

Double clicking on any light launches an editor that conveniently groups
all light controls into a single tabbed interface.

Here you can add volumetric effects, apply flat or spherical gels,
create fully customizable lens flares, define attenuation and color graphs,
and set specular and diffuse influence on a per-object basis.

Vue 10.5 xStream - Rendering

When run in stand-alone mode, Vue xStream performs exactly like Vue Infinite.
The features described in this page are identical to Vue Infinite.

Based on a solid ray-tracing foundation, Vue’s render engine incorporates all of today’s
high-end features, yet stands out in its ability to handle huge poly counts quickly and efficiently.

Unique technologies allow for a tight integration with the atmosphere engine and
for optimized rendering of EcoSystems and procedural terrains.

Vue 10.5 xStream - Requirements

Recommended System Specs

• Windows 64 bit (XP, Vista or Windows 7), Mac OS X v10.6
• Multi-core CPU (Intel QuadCore, Core I7, or Mac Pro),
• 4GB+ of RAM,
• 4GB+ of free Hard Disk space (on the drive hosting the OS),
• An OpenGL accelerated video board (see below for optimal compatibility)

Native Cocoa

Starting from version 9, Vue for the Macintosh platform was rewritten from the ground up
to reap maximum benefits of Apple's latest Mac OS X operating systems.

Vue will run natively on the Mac in 64 bit. On top of the added benefit of accessing
more memory, performance is also dramatically improved with anoverall boost of f
up to 3 times faster over previous Carbon 32 versions!