Dear Bodo,

Vue 11 Infinite, a major upgrade to one of your products under maintenance, will soon be shipping. As part of your maintenance contract, you will receive this new product at no charge.

We have also prepared a pre-release version of this product. If you like, you can download this pre-release version right away by following the instructions in this e-mail.

New features available in Vue 11 Infinite include:

Key features of Vue 11 include faster rendering, Illumination Caching, terrain and EcoPainter improvements, 360° population, interactive EcoSystem population, as well as particles. But it's not just particles, it's a new concept of particles! With Vue 11, you can do all the standard stuff that particles are good at, but you can also do a lot more. Rather than creating simple emitters, and having particles grow out of them, we designed a new way of handling particles that is specifically well suited for Digital Nature.

Here is a shortlist of some of the important new features included in Release 11 of Vue:

• EcoParticles: This new technology is ideal for the creation of animated rain, snow, waterfalls, explosions, fire, smoke, tornadoes, falling leaves, swarm of insects and more. Any object can be set as a particle source (emitter).
• EcoParticles as EcoSystems: EcoParticles are added to any material like a regular EcoSystem material layer. But with EcoParticles, you get in depth control over the way the particles will evolve over time. You can define the speed, direction, collision properties and duration of life of the particles, as well as subject them to external influences. On top of these new physical settings, all of the classic EcoSystem configuration parameters are used for particle instance population.
• EcoParticles Effectors: Effectors are special objects that will influence the EcoParticles in the scene. Effects like tornadoes, jittering, attraction, etc. are easily created this way.
• Automatic Weather Effects - Rain and Snow: These new atmospheric effects enable Artists to create anything from gentle spring rain to a tropical storm, a gentle falling snow to a blizzard, with just a few simple clicks. The heaviness, shape, drop size, speed and falling angle of the precipitation is user controllable. Motion blur can be added if desired too. Weather Effects are available for all types of atmospheres.
• EcoPainter Improvements: The EcoSystem Painter is completely redesigned to allow even more control and flexibility. You can now create their own brushes using a combination of effectors. For instance, brushes that will resize and align instances at the same time. There are a number of new brush effects to boot, including the ability to lean or rotate instances, raise or lower them, move them around, etc. EcoSystem Instance Selection is now also available in xStream for 3ds Max, Cinema4D and Softimage.
• Customizable EcoPainter Brushes: Like the brushes in the Terrain Editor, each EcoPainter brush now has its own dialog that displays all of the parameters that can be adjusted. If you want to display a specific brush parameter directly in the main EcoPainter dialog, they can do so with a click on the corresponding Publish icon. The EcoSystem Selection function has been merged with the EcoPainter. This way, you can use the select function to define the instances to work with, directly in the EcoSystem Painter dialog.
• EcoSystem Fast Population: Vue can now refresh the EcoSystem population interactively, without the need of any re-population action.
• EcoSystem 360° Population: Vue can now automatically populate EcoSystems from all directions including below objects. This feature works on any kind of object from basic spheres to complex geometry such as rocks, cars, houses... and all applicable EcoSystem settings are supported.
• Faster Rendering Speed: Significant internal optimizations made to Vue 11’s rendering engine will result in dramatically accelerated rendering especially on very dense EcoSystem scenes.
• Illumination Caching: This technology lets you re-use GI information over the course of an entire animation thus eliminating the need to re-render the GI pre-pass for every frame. This will dramatically reduce the rendering time of Architectural animations for instance.
• Many other improvements such as Shared Material layers, Nitrous accelerated graphics core support in 3ds Max, support for latest releases of the Autodesk 2013 products and Cinema4D R14, and more... 

Mazak

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