I am converting the taped presentations right now. Since I want to upload them in Full HD for best viewing quality it will take my poor Notebook the whole day to finish converting. So expect to see the videos on Youtube tomorrow.

Siggraph was well worth the visit. First and foremost I want to say that the e-on staff is really nice and friendly. I had the pleasure to meet Dax Pandhi, Vladimir Chopine and Amy Chopine and they are all incredibly nice people. Really heartwarming and so talented :-). Nicolas Pellegrino was there, as well. It's nice to connect the voice of the asilefx tutorials to a face ;-). I also ran into Dave Burdick and when I read his name on the badge I was like "Wow. It's great to meet the amazing python guy who made SkinVue." He was sort of surprised and probably a little scared of that crazy young guy that he didn't know ;-). Anyway, I had a nice chat with all of them and it was great to get to know the people behind the software.

The showreel was very similar to the one from 2009. On the demo PCs there was a screensaver that showed a lot of C3D portfolio artwork. I recognized images from kenwas, Arthur, Lars, Gary Miller, offrench, Dax Pandhi, Geek at Play, Gill Brooks, me and many more.

On to the new products. First up: Carbon Scatter

Not much to say about this one, it's identical to the Material Editor's interface when you are editing an Ecosystem material. If you don't want to purchase XStream, but you do want to use Ecosystems, then Carbon Scatter is the app to purchase. Eco Painting, all the usual standard Ecosystem controls, it's all there in an absolute identical interface to Vue's material editor. Don't know about Dynamic Population, though. The demonstration was done in 3DS Max No info on pricing or availability.

LumenRT: I wasn't impressed at all with that one, the promo image in the press release is a bit deceiving. To me it looked like a simple game engine from the 2000s where the radiosity lighting and reflections where baked on low-res textures. Plants are 2D sprites, the sky is a usual skybox.  However, I am lacking the technical knowledge, so I am not the one to judge. Since they didn't show how to create your own LumenRT environment I don't know what to really expect from this one. If you want to show your client the 3D environement, all you need to do is send him the compiled executable file of your LumenRT scene. He doesn't need a special plugin or an extra viewer, it's just a normal executable. That's a good feature. Again, no idea about price or launch date.

Now for the interesting part, Vue 9. Unfortunately I appeared to be the only one in the audience who had used Vue before, so the demonstrations were merely showcasing to all the others how Vue works in general, what Ecosystems are etc.

Here's a list of a couple of new or changed things that I noticed nonetheless:

• New interface: buttons now have a rectangle border around them which makes them look more professional and cleaner. Smaller buttons in editors have been rearranged and grouped together, for example all the shadow & lighting options in the material editor (only shadows, don't cast shadows, doublesided etc.). New symbols for parameters that are driven with a function and for a couple of other things. All in all very subtle changes that make Vue look more professional and that enhance the workflow. Very welcome.

• New subdivision slider ("divide up to...") on the Displacement & Bump Tab on the material editor. In addition to the quality of displacement materials you might now be able to specify the catmull clark subdivision level of your displaced material. Not sure about that one, though, since it wasn't demonstrated.

• A lot of new buttons and controls in the terrain editor, all related to creating your own 3D brushes. Looks almost as flexible as Photoshop brush controls. I am still on 8.4, so I don't know if there's a big difference to 8.5 or not. Again, no demonstration about the new features.

• New Rocky mountain fractal. Dax told me that this is supposed to be used in combination with other fractals - it will create rocky (or stonelike) structures on top of the terrain. I didn't see any finished images with it, but it reminded me a lot of the Fake stone shader concept in Terragen 2.

• Relighting. Probably one of the most interesting and impressive features. There's a new option in the render settings panel right beneath the G-Buffer/Multipass rendering options. This option is called "Enable relighting". Check this box and when the render is finished you will have a list of all the lights in your scene in the post render options (including the sunlight). Each light has its own intensity slider that you can use to make the light brighter or turn it off altogether. I hope that negative values will be possible, as well. You can also change the color of your light and save the settings like any other post-processing settings with your scene. Apparently rendertime doesn't increase at all with this feature. This can save you hours of rerendering your scene with different light settings. An awesome feature. My suggestion: Put some point lights in your scene at very dark places and then render the scene out. If it looks ok, leave the light turned off. If it's too dark then gradually increase the light intensity in the post render dialogue and see what it looks like.

• No changes in the atmosphere editor or to spectral clouds (sadly, no Metacloud improvement), except for cloud radiosity. In 6, 7 and 8 a high shadow density made the scene very, very dark if the clouds were covering most of your sky. With cloud radiosity clouds are now able to bounce back light as well and thus decreasing the shadow density on ground.

• Very important improvement: DRAMATICALLY reduced flickering!! E-on showed a comparison video between 8 and 9 with the same (final? broadcast?) render settings. Flickering is almost gone in Vue 9 without having to crank the AA way up. Of course this was a very simple demo scene - a terrain with a couple of cherry trees on top and a moving camera - but if both scenes were indeed rendered with the same settings the improvement is a giant leap forward. Good job, e-on.

• Interactive network rendering: There's a new network rendering option in the render dialog. I've never used network rendering before, so I have no idea how that one differs from render cows or a render bull network which are both still available.

• Hyperblobs: Basically, you can bake hypertextures to polygon objects now. Nice little addition that makes life a lot easier.

When I talked to one programmer I told him that I was very disappointed with the stability of Vue 8 and that 7 worked way better on my PC. I also said that I am not going to upgrade unless I read about truely improved stability in Vue 9. He agreed that stability is their biggest issue and that they are trying really hard to make Vue 9 way more stable and better performing than previous versions. That's also the reason why they didn't introduce a whole lot of new features this time around which is a good thing in my opinion. Another guy told me that e-on is indeed looking into a solution for creating waterfalls, but that might still take a couple of years until they are ready to implement it into a future version. For future versions I suggested to provide an option that enabled the user to drive the Detail amount slider for clouds with a custom function. He said that this is a very interesting idea that they haven't thought of and it shouldn't be too hard to implement. When I told him about Terragen 2 and its displacement possibilities he grinned insecurly and told me to screw that software ;-). At least he promised that displacement in Vue 9 isn't as memory hungry anymore as in 8 and virtually artefact free. I'd be glad if this was the case, but I'll take this statement with a grain of salt until I've seen prove for it.

Overall Vue 9 might finally be what we've all been waiting for. Although it was still in beta the software didn't crash during any of the presentations that I saw which is a good sign. If you're looking for a bunch of new features Vue 9 isn't probably worth an upgrade at all, at least as far as I have seen so far. But if e-on makes a very stable version for the first time then it's probably worth the money.