VUE xstream 2016 R6
| | Price £1,289 (standalone) / £1,517 (with one-year maintenance) company E-on software website info.e-onsoftware.com
It’s not been an easy almostyear for VUE, with its website and support still in rebuild mode due to the December 2017 hack. Luckily, this has not affected their development roadmap, and they managed to stick to their quarterly release cycle. VUE xstream 2016 R6 is the latest version, and it ships with the usual new features and improvements, like revamped import options and industry-standard shortcut updates, IBL importance sampling, randomised cloud layer parameters as well as Metacloud improvements and the ability to have Ecosystem populations with native instances in 3ds Max and C4D. It supports Lightwave 2018, and there have been significant performance updates.
While I can’t argue the increase in speed for the UI and Ecosystem population and display, which was impressively noticeable on my 64GB RAM/1080 setup, working in VUE and the xstream plugin was a very mixed experience. First of all, VUE xstream still has stability issues. On a fairly average 1080 with 64GB of RAM, and room to spare, xstream would crash to desktop randomly and without warning, especially when moving the camera. No amount of Nvidia driver updating, cache-clearing, troubleshooting or OPENGPL settings would remedy this. A check across the VUE community and also with 3D
World’s editor showed I was not the only user suffering this problem. In a day and age where even Bryce and DAZ Studio are more stable, and Clarisse beats xstream at a feature- and price-point between 700 and 1,000 dollars, this is fairly problematic, as the stability is only part of the issue. It’s compounded by the time it costs dealing with it, and in an application touting itself as a pipeline staple, no less.
Add to that the stability issues with outdated Plantfactory assets, which usually need updating per release, and you are in a pretty touch-and-go situation where workflow is concerned. Sometimes it will work like a dream, other times it has quirks like you will not believe.
Stability and asset issues aside, this new release does bring a fair amount of features and improvements to the table. Most tangible, as mentioned, is the really good speed improvement in the UI as well as when populating and displaying Ecosystems, which have been given a few additional tweaks and improvements – it generates its cache noticeably faster, and you can now set the display quality for each item in said population list, which is no doubt a relief when working on very densely populated scenes.
Those interested in the big, beautiful skies and atmospheres you can generate with VUE also received some new features for tuning and tweaking your clouds into any level of increased complexity, as you can now randomise cloud layer parameters, as well as work with improved Metacloud functionality like randomisation and scaling.
My favourite things in this release were actually the ‘small’ stuff rather than the big features, like the spline improvements, the updated cross-application UI keys and the camera improvements, which now make the perspective view specific to a camera in a viewport, meaning you finally can have multiple views going, showing the view and its perspective for any camera you choose.
I’d have loved to test the updated Max plugin, but alas, on my Max 2017 and 2018 installs, Max crashed with the plugin installed. Max stopped crashing on plugin removal.
So is xstream worth picking up? In terms of pricing, xstream used to be alone in its capability of creating amazing vegetation and ecosystems. It can still do that without breaking a sweat. However, these days it is competing with several applications that can do the same, and for a cheaper price: Clarisse at £ 760, Terragen Pro at £532, and then there are the free game engines. In addition, it’s competing with combos like 3ds Max, Forestpack, and Growfx. Where VUE beats all of them is in terms of accessibility, user friendliness and assets, as mentioned last review. When it behaves and works, it works well, as its history with film studios can attest. However, if the range of VUE applications are to demand their high pricing in today’s market, they need a codebase refactoring to get rid of the many user irks we’ve seen in recent years. If that happened, I would recommend it in a heartbeat, as on the other side of the annoying quirks is an application that was initially built to let you get creative, getting your fingers dirty creating landscapes at any level of suspended disbelief, and have a ball doing so. But right now? I honestly don’t know.
I’d give VUE a ten out of five in a heartbeat if they got rid of a lot of old and annoying issues. However, if you are in the market for fast, easy digital nature, and don’t mind asking the community for help troubleshooting, then it’s worth checking out.