Vue D'Esprit 4 Review
Reviewed by: Pascal St-Laurent

How important is background in a surrounding area? Very! Your character can't just sit around on a black screen. Vue d'Esprit 4 will produce what is needed. From creating land, sky, water, texture to making animation, everything is easy to do. E-on Software also has great people working for them especially in the support Dept. because they were there to give me hand with a couple of glitches. Big thanks to those guy's.

Back to business! When you start the program for the first time, a kick-start tutorial pops up to show you some of the basic features and the interface. Talking about the interface, it's nice, clean and it's easy to find everything. You can get your four views in different mode; wireframe, shaded, etc. The right side contains the materiel box and the world panel, which will display the layers and every object in the scene. Tools are on the left side and commands on the top.

At the start of every project, you are offered multiple choices of pre-defined skies. You may change it later but you'll probably find the sky want within those offered. You mold your terrain or section of it by going into the terrain editor which offers seven basic land types; canyon, mountain, dune, iceberg, eroded, mounds, or picture. You can import a grayscale image. Modification of the basic terrain I accomplished by a really cool 3D paint interface, working on a 3D representation of your terrain. You can raise, dig, and set a specific altitude. You can also paint on some great special effects such as pebble, gravel, stairs, terraces, craters, fir trees, various forms of erosion and more. Edits can be Overall or regional it's your choice. It can give a nice finishing touch. It gives the opportunity to mix a mountain setting with a lunar setting and that's before putting the finishing touches. You see your change right away with a 3D plane representing the land you're working on. A range of colors going from dark green to white show the altitude. Resize your terrain at your liking. It's just a plain and simple way to create your own piece of land.

You are given only primitive and Boolean mathematic formulas for modeling. Don't get me wrong, it's a landscape software so you can't expect to do a lot of modeling with it like you would with 3DS Max or Rhino. Just import them or export your landscape.

What about a texture editor! They give you a series of pre-defined textures split in different categories that you choose. You can also create on your own and save them in a categories for future use. The possibilities are endless when you do them from scratch; simple texture, mix texture or volumetric. You choose your color or set of colors, the patterns offered are numerous. Bumps maps follow after where again they offer multiple maps or you can load them. For every choice you make, you can choose a frequency and change the scale. After all that, you can adjust the highlight, transparency and more. It's almost limitless when creating your texture. If you don't feel like picking or creating, just load a JPG or BMP.

Just a quick note about Lens Flares. They are marvelous! You can even change the color of the halo they produce. Normal parameters such as intensity, brightness, and fade distances, color are still there to be changed if you choose to do so.

I'm not a big fan of animation so I'm not a expert at it. Surprisingly, I found it pretty easy to animate with Vue d'Esprit 4. They've included a 'mover' to help animate your scene. You can create your path and give your object special features such as move as an airplane, helicopter or missile so the object is going to bank in the corner. You've got those for ground objects such as a car, bike, etc. You set the axis that the object is going to keep facing. Once done with the 'wizard' you can open the animation window and start playing your little animation. Change each Keyframe at your will; change some actions such as rotation, scale, texture, etc. You can still change the path in your four mains views. You can animate your texture, for example; your water can look like it's making waves or have a breeze going through your grass. Pretty neat! Exportation is possible. Multiple formats are offered such as AVI, QuickTime and more.

Depending on your computer specs, the rendering time may vary. But the quality is always going to be there. A choice of 5 settings for quality and 22 aspect ratio's for the camera is offered. You can decide the size of the render screen. Also, there's a panoramic option where you decide the angle of view.

I recommend freelancers and employees to buy it for those simple reasons, it's easy to learn, easy to use, the quality is just awesome and mainly, for $200 us, it's a give away!