June 01, 2010. Beaverton, Oregon: e-on software, maker of the leading solutions for natural 3D environments, today announced the immediate availability of the Personal Learning Editions (PLE) of its solutions for CG professionals, Vue 8.5 xStream and Vue 8.5 Infinite.

Vue 8.5 Personal Learning Edition

Vue Infinite and Vue xStream offers CG professionals the premiere solution for creating exceptionally rich and realistic Digital Nature environments with seamless integration into any production workflow.

While Vue Infinite is a standalone application, Vue xStream operates seamlessly inside of 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, Cinema4D and Softimage.

Key new technologies available in the Vue 8.5 PLE:

• Global Gamma Control: the ability to fully control the gamma in Vue ensures perfect coherence all along the user’s pipeline and will result in much higher fidelity of color and light in the final images. Users can fully control input and output gammas as well as the gamma used for displaying textures and colors inside the application.
• Interactive Cloud Control: cloud layers can be manipulated, rotated or resized interactively using the standard manipulation gizmos. They can also be animated using standard animation tools.
• Animated Planetary Cloud Density Maps: users can define animated maps to control the density of cloud layers on a planetary scale (e.g. to create animated hurricane shots).
• Diagnosis Render Passes: users can easily detect rendering bottlenecks and optimize render times by using the diagnosis render passes. For each pixel in the image Vue can indicate total render time of the pixel, number of anti-aliasing rays, number of texture anti-aliasing samples, total number of sub-rays in the pixel, total number of shadow rays, max recursion depth reached by a sub-ray, and number of final gather samples for that pixel.
• Unlimited Material Painting: the material painting tool allows painting distribution maps with any arbitrary number of materials. These painted materials can also be used as paint masks to constrain painting of other materials inside existing distribution maps.
• Zone Extraction: specific areas of a procedural terrain can be extracted by simply selecting a zone and converting it to a separate procedural terrain. This is ideal to create customized textures on specific areas for instance.
• New Terrain Sculpting Tools: Vue 8.5 introduces 4 powerful new sculpting brushes: Pinch, Flatten, Plateau and UniSlope. Also new in Vue 8.5 is the ability to use a bitmap for reference when sculpting in the terrain editor.
• Advanced EcoSystem Control: with Vue 8.5, artists can easily control the influence of the color variations on EcoSystem populations, drag multiple objects or plants from a browser into the EcoSystem population list, EcoSystem painting can be constrained using the underlying EcoSystem material rules (for instance, using influence of slope and altitude or the coloring rules) and more…
• Improved OpenGL Engine and Viewport Display: auto-exposure is now reflected in OpenGL views, terrain maps can be viewed directly in the terrain editor, the display quality of EcoSystem instances can be changed on individual population elements, OpenGL preview displays normal mapped surfaces, the EcoPainter brush size is now displayed in xStream for 3ds Max and C4D.
• Other improvements: the Z-Depth buffer can now be (optionally) anti-aliased, preview a Dynamic EcoSystem anytime by clicking the Preview button in the EcoSystem material, the user may define his own shortcuts in editors (panning, rotating, etc – for instance to match settings of other applications) together with many other improvements.

More information on the new features of Vue 8.5 is available at www.e-onsoftware.com/professional.

PLE Requirements and Restrictions:

The Vue 8.5 PLE is a fully functional version of Vue 8.5 xStream/Infinite. With the PLE, users can:

• Create complete projects,
• Save their work and export to other applications,
• Render stills and animations without size/length limit,
• Experience Vue’s power directly inside Max/Maya/Softimage/LightWave/Cinema4D,
• Learn at their own pace (the PLE never expires)!

The Personal Learning Edition ships with a wide selection of Vue presets, as well as the complete PDF Reference manual.

Users can download the Vue 8.5 PLE at no charge from www.vue8.com/ple.

The Vue 8.5 Personal Learning Edition performs under all versions of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit), and is Mac Intel 32bit only for Macintosh OSX (10.5 to 10.6). The Vue 8.5 PLE is not yet optimized for Cocoa 64.

The PLE is for personal, non-commercial use only. Network rendering is disabled, and renders may be watermarked and carry a logo. Files created and saved with the PLE cannot be exchanged with other PLE users and are not compatible with other versions of Vue.

About e-on software

E-on software is the leading developer of solutions for the creation, animation, rendering and integration of natural 3D environments. Offering a wide array of Digital Nature products and applications, e-on software provides solutions adapted to every project and budget. E-on software products are used worldwide by the film, television, architecture, game, science, educational and entertainment industries.

E-on software products were used in features film such as “Avatar”, “Clash of The Titans”, “The Wolf Man”, “2012”, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”, “GI Joe – The Rise of The Cobra”, “The Proposal”, “Land Of The Lost”, “Terminator 4, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, “Indiana Jones 4″, “Monster Vs Aliens”, “Australia”, “The Spiderwick Chronicles”, “KungFu Panda”, “Pirates of the Caribbean 2″ and TV series such as “Battlestar Gallactica”, “Stargate Atlantis” and more. Read more on these stories in e-on software’s Spotlights section: www.e-onsoftware.com/spotlight.

E-on software was founded on the premise that powerful graphics tools should never get in the way of the designer’s creativity. By investing significant resources into research and development, e-on software is able to deliver cutting-edge, user friendly technologies that produce stunning Digital Nature scenery.

E-on software is based in Beaverton, Oregon with a European office in Paris, France.

Visit their website at http://www.e-onsoftware.com.