Curious Labs, makers of the 3D human-modelling software Poser, and E-on software, makers of 3D landscape software Vue d'Esprit, have teamed up to enable native Poser animation technology to be added to Vue d'Esprit. Vue d'Esprit can import still Poser scenes, says E-on, and then only on Windows. The addition, says the company, will mean both Macintosh and Windows users will be able to run Poser animations fluidly through a 3D Vue d'Esprit scene. E-on says it will showcase the new technology at Siggraph 2002 -- held in Texas on July 21-26. Drag0n98

It sounds like a great news dragOn98 !

I'm sure that the POSER users will love this new feature !

But to be more realistic, e-on should first work on VUE's rendering engine. By now, it's not adequate for animation. It's way to slow, the anti-aliasing is not good enough, the motion blur is grainy, shadows are noisy, there is always flickering on highly contrasted material or geometrical patterns (i.e. tiles) and the color are bleeding most of the time. Even with the highest rendering quality, the results are always very poor.

VUE4 is perfect (although way too slow) for still images but I think we'll have to wait for VUE 5 or 6 to be able to do animations with it !

:( Eric

I am not into animations at all, either in Poser or in Vue. I would like to see this co-operation enabling .vob objects to be exported as .obj instead of only terrains being exportable. I cannot help feeling that this would get a lot more use than the ability to run animations in Vue.

Vue dEsprit Product Line to Feature Native Poser Animation

E-ON SOFTWARE TO FEATURE NEW POSER-BASED TECHNOLOGY AT SIGGRAPH 2002

June 17, 2002. Beaverton, OR. e-on software and Santa Cruz, California based Curious Labs have entered into a strategic agreement to enable Curious Labs Poser native animation technology in the Vue dEsprit product line.

e-on softwares flagship product Vue dEsprit 4 for Windows and Mac OS X is an award-winning rendering and animation tool for ultra-natural 3D scenery. Curious Labs Poser 4 is widely recognized as the easiest way to develop complex 3D human and character animation.

Vue dEsprit 4 for Windows features the ability to import still Poser scenes. The agreement will allow the Vue product line to host fully animated Poser scenes.

Despite limitations in the Mac OS X - Classic environment, developments made by Curious Labs and e-on software will enable the technology to work seamlessly with Vue dEsprit 4 for Mac OS X. Still import for Mac OS X will be featured in an updater, available soon.

The response to direct, still import of Poser scenes in Vue 4 was overwhelming. We believe the Vue user community will be thrilled with seeing their Poser creations move fluidly through a Vue dEsprit scene said Nicholas Phelps, president of e-on software.

Vue 4 comes with 2 CDs, bursting with 30 SolidGrowth 2 tree and plants, over 100 atmospheres, 100 different types of clouds, 300 materials, 250 high quality fully textured 3D objects and over 50 example scenes made by Vue master artists. A 360-page manual is also included.

Vue 4 is an incredible tool for generating and animating the natural world. We at Curious Labs are excited that Posers advanced character animation can exploit the powerful rendering capabilities of e-on softwares products, said Steve Cooper, president of Curious Labs, Inc.

e-on software will showcase the new technology at Siggraph 2002, held in San Antonio, Texas, July 21-26. Additional information about Siggraph is available at http://www.siggraph.org.

About e-on software

Founded in 1997, e-on software was established to develop and promote the highest quality graphics tools with professional strength features. Established by graphics enthusiasts for graphics enthusiasts, e-on software translates its passion for art into tools for the graphics community. E-on software is based in Beaverton, Oregon and Paris, France. The company has achieved worldwide reputation for its award winning 3D scenery generator Vue d'Esprit.

About Curious Labs, Inc.
Curious Labs, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of EGISYS AG, designs, develops, and publishes software tools such as Poser, which focus on 3D human and character visualization for artists, designers, and web developers. The company is located in Santa Cruz, California. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.curiouslabs.com.

Contact

e-on software
503-646-4857

Curious Labs, Inc
831-462-8908

Thanks Lynn, I just were going to post this press release:-) Guitta

"Despite limitations in the Mac OS X - Classic environment" What the @#$% is that supposed to mean? OK sorry not the place for OS wars. Still what does that mean? E-on's webs site sez it only works with the OSX version of poser--Is thsi a contridiction of that? Am I missing something here?

YIPPIIIAAAAAEEEEEHHHHH!!!!! This was the press release I've been waiting for quite a long time. Now I'll be able to import my Poser scenes under MacOSX without using the really anoying OBJ-import method. Thanks eon!!!

This is from the Poser forum, sounds like good news to me. AND answered my question. Jon The full PR is in the Vue d'Esprit forum, however what may be lost to some is that we've developed a means to host Poser scenes in Vue 4 for Mac OS X, even though Poser 4 is a OS 9.2 app (not recommended under classic). So very soon, you'll be able to import Poser 4 still scenes into Vue 4 on the Mac, and the animation will come later for both platforms. We will be showing this off at Siggraph next month. best regards, Lynn Fredricks e-on software

I'm with Eric on this ;o). It is nice to have the technology available to use animated Poser scenes, but the render engine needs some serious upgrading before I would consider doing animations. As Eric said, the rendering is too slow, even on a dual processor machine, especially with the polygon counts involved with Poser meshes;o(. If there was network rendering then that would make it better, but then there is the graininess associated with blur and soft shadows etcit causes too much flickering! I have faith in E-on to sort these problems out...but like Eric feel that the render quality should have been looked at first. Cheers

...as there is no way to make the Vue-Topology visible in Poser. Sure, you could animate someone walking across a flat beach, but how should that same object be made to walk up a hill or walk around any thing that might come in it's way. Of course, with a lot of time and a lot of trial and error, this could be possible, but since poser does not support gravity or any kind of physics and Vue d'Esprit has nothing in this way either, the feature just lacks any usefulness. Imagine a Poser-Animation walking up a hill after tweaking the animation for two days - without changing its pace or motion-behaviour. Sounds like a good idea, but I do not think the programms are yet capable of handling this in any useful way. On the other hand I would just love to be proved wrong on these points. Maybe it would be possible to import an a-proxy representation of the Vue-Landscape into Poser as well as some funktion to change the kind of movement corresponding to the terrain. Joerg

Well I think this would come in handy for those who want to do animations that take place in a room or on a street. We have seen(and I have done) many scenes where there is a flat surface.

I don't personally have any use for such an ability though. Plus I know how long a high quality render single frame picture takes. I can only imaging how long an animation in Vue would be. :)

Personally I am only using Vue for it's single image, but hey, I am sure there is a decent amount of those who could find a use for this. :)

Wish they would team up with Truespace on that aspect... with it's gravity features and skinning abilities, importing a animation in Truespace would work alot better then in Vue. However, I agree that it would be nice if they allowed for the export of VOB objects rather then just the landscapes. Or for that matter at least upgrading the versions of files they are able to import... for example, alot of my Truespace objects I've made can't import into Vue because Vue only accepts version 2 of TS's objects and I'm up to version 5 of Truespace. I find that pretty annoying. Does that make sense?

Oh goody , Poser animations in VUE, just what we needed but then again may be most certainly not. Unless there are real improvements in further VUE versions that go beyond the desire to be a Poser plugin, I'm not likely to upgrade beyond the current version.

I'm happy to see this announcement. I've been using Vue and Poser for quite a while now. While I do this for fun I've been paid for a couple of the pieces I've produced. I've done a number of animated idents and scenes mostly for my own pleasure. Up until now however being restricted to still poser import has limited how useful poser was for me. Now I can look forward to really being able to play with animation properly. Personally I've had no problem getting good quality animation renders from vue. Nor have I found the speed of animation rendering to be a problem. I tend to ignore vue's estimated render times because they seem to get skewed too high when a scene is complex or when rendering animation. Its also possible to wreck the quality of the animation by using some of the encoding options. One improvement that would be useful would be to be able to do the rendering of the animation and then encode it afterwards rather than having to re-render to change an encoding setting. Anyway I look forward to being able to bring animations into Vue from Poser. Mark

I agree with Impish. I too look forward to bringing Poser animations into Vue. As far as animation quality and render times, I too believe Vue is in need of a serious tune-up. However, I have faith that E-On and Curious Labs are also aware of this fact and would not even consider adding this new animation feature unless Vue's animation short comings have/will be addressed.