Mover 2 for Vue d'Esprit
Reviewed by Lisa Casler

The new Mover 2 Plugin for Vue d'Esprit is a very nice addition to an excellent landscape generator program. Instead of a complicated animation plugin, Mover 2 creates with an easy to learn Wizard interface. Your given a choice of vehicles from airplanes and missiles to cars and pedestrians with options on how the vehicle responds to motion. Speed and repeat settings are available so you can tweak the velocity and if you want the animation to loop, repeat once or create a nice pendulum effect. You create the path for your vehicle in a wireframe view, adding, deleting and editing Waypoints until you get the path you want. After you have your path setup the Wizard will show you your plot of camera altitudes and you can set the amount of seconds you want the animation to run. A wireframe view of your animation in action shows you what the animation will look like. You can click the back button to change any settings till you get the look you want.

Making a Vue d'Esprit flythrough with Mover 2

The finished animated flythrough.

This is the scene I used for the flythrough.

The opening screen for the Mover 2 Wizard. The Wizard makes it especially easy to create a flythrough.

On this screen you select the type of vehicle you wish to use in your flythrough. Depending on the one you choose, it will act differently when flying through the scene. For example, the Airplane will bank moderately while flying above the ground but the Automobile will follow the lay of the ground. I chose the Pedestrian for my flythrough.

Here you set the repeat and speed modes. I used the "Repeat Once" and the "Constant Velocity" settings.

This is the fun part, setting the paths you want the flythrough to use. Remember the longer the path, the longer the render.

A view of the camera attributes and where you set how many seconds you want your animation to run. If you make your animation run longer, you will have a long render time. My suggestion is to start out with a small amount of time, see how your animation looks and increase the time if need be.

I personally love this part, you get to see a Wireframe version of your flythrough. If you don't like the path, click on the back button and change the settings.

After you click the "Finish" button, the Wizard closes and the Time Line Bar comes up. This is a capture from the Wizard showing the different parts of the Time Line Bar.

This is the Render Animation's Settings screen. You can choose the quality, size, set where you want the animation to save, frames per second and all or a frame sequence. You also look here if you want to resume that render you stopped.

       
A view of the animation render in progress. I usually create a small animation the first time and if I like it, I size it up.

Another animation I created.

The Rating: 9+

The Plus: The Mover 2 plugin does a fantastic job at flythroughs. I had "0" crashes with it and the Wizard made it extremely simple for even a first time animator to use. Pricing as stated on the e-on Software's site is $59 (US) for Mover 2, a nice price for an excellant plugin.

The Minus: The only minus that I found is the option to do a wireframe animation that you can save. This is not really a minus, but it would be nice.

Minimum System Requirements

. Vue d'Esprit 2 · Pentium 120 MHz (166 MHz recommended)
· Windows 95/98 or NT4
· 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended)
· 30 MB HD space (50 MB recommended)
· 16- or 24-bit video
· CD-ROM Media

You can visit their web site by clicking Vue d'Esprit