e-on Software has introduced its first Mac product, Vue d’Esprit 4, at this week’s Macworld San Francisco. For Mac OS X only, it’s a landscape generator that includes SolidGrowth, a vegetation synthesis and rendering technology.
Vue d’Esprit 4 is the first e-on product for the Mac platform, but it won’t be the last. It’s the first of a series, President Nicholas Phelps told MacCentral. From now on the company’s products will be released for the Mac and Windows platforms simultaneously. And look for all the Mac products to be Mac OS X only.
“We actually started a version Vue d’Esprit 4 for Mac OS 9, but scrapped it when Apple shipped their newest operating system,” Phelps said. “Vue d’Esprit 4 is totally Mac OS X native.”
Vue d’Esprit is optimized for the creation, rendering and animation of natural scenery. Version 4 features a completely new interface design optimized for ease-of-use and productivity, he said. Its rendering features include volumetric effects, glowing materials, lens flares, stars and planets, rocks, and more.
Vue d’Esprit lets you use outdoor lighting algorithms in tandem with a variety of rendering effects to produce natural looking pictures. Objects, materials, atmospheres, clouds, waves, and just about anything can be animated due to e-on’s Dynamic Motion Reaction technology. Advanced users can also fine tune their animations with access to all animation properties, time spline control, motion blur, forward dynamics, field interlacing, flicker reduction, non-square pixels, animated alpha, and Z buffers for compositing.
You can link objects to create complex animated structures and take precise control of all animation properties by editing keyframes directly and adjusting the flow of time. Plus, you can preview your animations with a customizable animation preview.
The application is open to other 3D apps. You can import models created with other software using an extensive set of import filters. Objects created with TrueSpace, 3D Studio, Lightwave, or Poser can be imported.
A demo is available at the e-on Web site. Vue D’Esprit costs US$199.