Reviewed by Tim Feldman
Over the years, there have been a number of nice PC programs for this kind of task. The first one that comes to mind is "Vista Pro, a well-known DOS program. It did an excellent job, but DOS imposed severe limitations on this kind of graphics-intensive application.
More recently, a landscape-creation program named "Bryce" has won a large share of the Windows market for those graphics artists who need to render virtual landscapes. Bryce is an impressive program, with a distinctive user interface. However, it is a professional-grade program (meaning that it is fairly expensive).
The French Competition
Several years have passed since I last used a version of Bryce. I'd been daydreaming of buying a current version when I came across an interesting alternative from France: "Vue d'Esprit," from e-on Software. The price was right, so I gave it a try. I am very pleased with the results. I demonstrated it at SPCUG's Davis chapter's September meeting.
I should start out by explaining that the version that I own is version 2.1; but versions up to 3.1 and 4 are also currently available from e-on Software. I bought the older version indirectly: it was part of a CD attached to a magazine for computer graphics programmers. You've probably checked out such magazines at some time; they contain slightly dated versions of commercial software, along with an offer to upgrade to the current version at a substantial discount. I bought the magazine, installed the software, and was quite pleasantly surprised at its quality. When I checked the Web, I discovered that the program is quite popular, with many third-party sites devoted to it.
The Basics
Many of those Web sites show gorgeous images created with Vue d'Esprit. It's a very powerful program. I demonstrated only its most basic features at the September meeting; I'll describe them here.
Vue d'Esprit is a 3D raytracing program, optimized and tuned for drawing landscapes, plants, and natural objects. When you fire it up, you see four different views of a scene, drawn in wireframe. Three views are at right angles, like architectural blueprints; the fourth shows the view through the virtual camera that looks at the scene. Dialogs, buttons, and menus allow you to choose a sky to illuminate your scene and to add various objects to the scene.
There are quite a few kinds of objects built into Vue d'Esprit, from simple 3D geometric shapes such as spheres and pyramids to realistic plants and trees. Other basic objects are planes of water, crinkled sheets of terrain, and so on. You can also import objects from other popular 3D programs such as 3D Studio Max or AutoCAD; so, the program is not limited to its built-in objects.
As you fill your scene with objects, you use the controls to modify their positions, orientations, sizes, textures, colors, and material. It is quite easy to modify the objects; the program is very interactive. Every once in a while, you press a button that draws or "renders" a preview of the scene as viewed through the camera. With its default rendering settings, the program previews most scenes very quickly; that encourages you to experiment and refine your scene.
When you're satisfied with the scene, you can make a final, full-sized rendering, generating a still image as a graphics file. If you've composed your scene skillfully, the results can be so realistic that they can fool many viewers into thinking that they are actual photographs.
Many Knobs
Of course, to get that skillful requires quite a lot of twiddling and experimenting. After all, taking a great photograph of a real scene with a real camera can be difficult enough—and that's when nature has already created the scene for you—but with a 3D program, you have to create the scene, too!
In order for you to do all the necessary twiddling and experimenting, Vue d'Esprit has dialogs, buttons, and menu options—many of them—quite possibly, hundreds of them! And each one has many possible settings. It is a tribute to the program's designers that you can achieve quite nice results very quickly after starting to use the program; you don't need to learn a lot before you can use the program. The default settings are good enough to get you started.
Bet You Can't Create Just One World
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Or maybe "hooked" is a better word than "started"; I find that creating scenes with the program is such fun that it can eat up lots of my spare time. It is quite relaxing, late at night, to play with the program, creating exotic landscapes, covering them with vegetation, adjusting the angle and strength of the sunlight, and filling up many megabytes of disk space with my images. One of my favorites is a cold ocean scene, with an iceberg floating nearby. You can see down into the water a short way; there is a hint of the massiveness of the submerged part of the iceberg, lurking below the surface.
During my demonstration at the September meeting, I modified that iceberg scene to show how easy it is to experiment with Vue d'Esprit. One particularly nice tool lets you automatically adjust the vertical position of any object in the scene so that its bottom touches the ground level; you use it to easily position plants on the ground. We used it to put a palm tree on the iceberg (nobody says that you have to be sensible when you create your own worlds!).
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Hints on World-Building
While the program is so rich that you can have fun just playing with it without any planning at all, you'll probably learn more of its features if you have a definite plan when you create a scene. I've worked out a method for learning about the program, based on the idea of having a goal to guide me.
The first step is to convince yourself that the program can render just about any natural scene that you can envision. This is just a matter of blind faith; an attitude, if you will. Then, flip through something like National Geographic magazine until you find a landscape photograph that catches your eye. Pretend that it was actually rendered by Vue d'Esprit instead of photographed. Once you've tricked yourself into looking at the photograph that way, start creating the largest features of the scene with Vue d'Esprit: the mountains, valleys, beaches, water, moon, and so on. Then go on to add the vegetation. Finally, adjust the colors and textures to match the photograph as closely as you can.
In following that method, you'll have to keep convincing yourself that the program can render every natural feature in the photograph. Then it's a matter of reading the online help and experimenting with the program's settings and controls until you can duplicate those features. Sometimes a search of the Web will find helpful explanations and tutorials from other users. Before you know it, you will have learned a great deal about using the program, and the quality of your work will improve immensely.
Rendering More Than Landscapes
The program isn't a 3D modeling tool—that is, it isn't intended for use in designing complex objects with precise dimensions. For that, you would use something like Caligari's trueSpace, AutoCAD, or some other 3D engineering program. Nonetheless, if you can import a 3D object into Vue d'Esprit from another program, Vue d'Esprit can render it quite nicely. And since it is very good for composing scenes, you may actually prefer to use Vue d'Esprit to render the final drawings that show your imported models, instead of rendering them with the engineering programs themselves. Many of the Vue d'Esprit examples that I have found on the Web were created that way.
Not for Humans
One obvious gap in the program is that it contains lots of plants, but no animals more complicated than a few simple insects and fish. That's no surprise, and nothing that I would criticize the authors for; animals are still the hardest 3D objects to render convincingly. Most 3D modeling programs use special optional extensions for modeling humans and animals.
So if you really need to populate your virtual worlds with virtual creatures, you'll need to import them from some other program. And you'll need to expend a lot of effort to get them to look realistic. There is one possible workaround in Vue d'Esprit: you can apply an image to a simple 3D shape, and put that into the scene. So, you could paste 2D images of humans or animals onto flat cutouts and put them into your scenes. It's crude, and it limits your lighting options, but I have seen it used effectively in real museum dioramas. It would probably be best used for distant background figures in Vue d'Esprit scenes.
Availability
Obtaining Vue d'Esprit through a magazine CD was an excellent bargain, but you had to be there at the right time and place to get in on it. If you missed out, you may have to order Vue d'Esprit from the publisher; I don't know if any mainstream software stores sell it. e-on Software's Web site has ordering information. Their U.S. prices looked less than half what a copy of Bryce currently costs.
Vue d'Esprit
e-on Software
Version 4, 2 CD's, $199
30-day demo available, 30MB
