e-on Software
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e-on Software Shifts Focus: Free Perpetual Access To VUE, PlantFactory, And PlantCatalog After 27 Years Of Innovation
e-on software products have served the media and entertainment industry for over 27 years. Following its acquisition by Bentley Systems in 2015, e-on software’s technologies have been integrated into various Bentley products and have been used by valued customers and partners world-wide.
For over 39 years, Bentley’s focus has been to serve engineers and other professionals responsible for designing, constructing, and operating sustainable infrastructure. To keep our focus, we have decided to end sales for VUE, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog. These products will not be further developed, and support will be limited to critical security patches.
However, we are offering free downloads and usage of VUE, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog as perpetual versions to anyone interested in continuing to utilize these products and technologies! Simply download the product and acknowledge the new end-user-license-agreement (EULA) agreeing to using the software without support.
Click the Download button below to gain access to these products or see the FAQ for more details. Thank you for your support and understanding.
Resources
FAQs
EULA
Yes, you may use the products commercially. This includes any renderings created with the software or assets exported from the software. You may retexture, remodel and resell any of the stock content which ships with VUE and PlantFactory. This includes both meshes and textures.
However, please be aware that you may not sell any content derived from PlantCatalog models (see the next question).
In short, no. Despite PlantCatalog being freeware, all plants are copyrighted by Bentley Systems. You may use the models commercially (e.g., embed them into games, share them with clients, or embed them into project files) and you may create renderings, both still or animated, using PlantCatalog models.
However, you may not resell any models derived from PlantCatalog content on marketplaces. If you want to sell plant models, you may create your own models from scratch in PlantFactory while making sure to not use any textures or metanodes from PlantCatalog plants.
Installation
VUE 2023 and PlantFactory 2023 are the last official releases published by e-on software. When it was decided to discontinue development of the products, the VUE 2024 and PlantFactory 2024 releases were in their final stage of completion. This is why we’re continuing to offer both releases for download.
If you need a production-proven release, we suggest downloading the 2023 version of these products. If you want to use the new features in these products, we recommend installing the 2024 versions, which have lots of great new features and functionalities listed below. Please be aware that the 2024 release of both products are supplied “as is,” meaning as an unfinished beta version. While they are quite stable overall, you may experience a few bugs and the occasional crash.
In general, we recommend installing both versions of these products side-by-side into different folders. The plant archives from PlantCatalog work in both the 2023 and the 2024 versions without issues.
Main features in VUE 2024:
- Technology preview: Rendering with Cycles inside of VUE through the USD hydra bridge
- Feature preview: Multiple Scattering for clouds in the VUE raytracer for converted OpenVDBs from cloud layers and MetaClouds
- Conversion of cloud layers and MetaClouds into OpenVDB directly within the application without the need for export and import workflows
- Substantial speedup in OpenVDB rendering, baking and export
- SmartClouds: A new library of 22 procedural, parametric cloud materials with lots of customization options and built-in animation support
- New Export Central Panel with global and local export overrides
- New Published Parameters Editor
- Function Editor: New nodes (Packed Round Samples 2D), much improved performance in large graphs, substantial speedup in fractal and noise computation, new node frames for adding annotations to the graph and improving the visual organization
- Frame guides for better scene composition (golden spiral & rule of thirds)
- Redesigned Color Picker
- Redesigned Spline Editor
- Redesigned Options Panel
- Improved creation of V-Ray materials in the plugins in all host applications
- Greatly improved docking system
Main features in PlantFactory 2024:
- New UV preview panel & workspace for interactive UV previewing
- New UV options (UV inheritance, continuity options across nodes, keep aspect ratio along segment, Whole V mapping end)
- Define separate materials for blending areas
- Custom mesh hierarchy options: define arbitrary hierarchy levels for splitting the mesh during export & for Pivot Painter 2.0 support inside Unreal Engine 4 & 5
- New options in the Cutout Leaf: Smoothing the border for organic shapes, normal editing parameters for applying spherical normals and custom normal modulation strength to vertex normal
- New “Mesh” editing mode for the Cutout Leaf for 3D editing of the created mesh
- Improved viewport: Preview vertex normals, better highlighting of selected parts using configurable outlines & overlays, clipping options for underground plant parts, orthographic camera, camera presets (front, left, top, right views etc.), better wireframe visibility
- Improved AO computation speed
- Improved preset edition through a visual preset browser and reordering options for existing presets
- New leaf cluster baking options for e.g. baking textures out of a cylindrical photogrammetry mesh; support for baking backlight (translucency) into a texture
- New child parameters: Zig-zag shape, pair offset & offset mode, splitting of SDS blending and standard blending to offer a fallback blending when SDS blending fails
- Support for master materials & material instances in the PlantFactory Unreal Engine 4 & 5 plugins
- Automatic creation of Pivot Painter 2.0 data in the Unreal Engine 4 & 5 plugins for real-time wind support (based on the hierarchy structure setup within the plant)
- Improved creation of V-Ray materials in the plugins in all host applications
- Support for quads, triangles & mixed quads / triangles meshing modes in the plugins
- Support for converting LODs using the native host application’s LOD system using the plugins
- New Export Central Panel
- Graph: New nodes (Packed Round Samples 2D), much improved performance in large graphs, substantial speedup in fractal and noise computation, new node frames for adding annotations to the graph and improving the visual organization
- New Published Parameters Editor
- Redesigned Color Picker
- Redesigned Options Panel
You can install the incremental updaters for release 2023 on top of your existing installation. The updaters will remove the licensing system from the software so that it will never expire. If you previously activated the software using a license key, the license key will still be shown in the “Help” menu, but it will no longer be needed to access the software.
VUE & PlantFactory 2024 are only offered as a full installer and not as an updater, due to changes to the supplied content structure within VUE & PlantFactory which requires a full install.
Either way, we still recommend you fully uninstall your previous installations of VUE and PlantFactory and install the full perpetual ISOs from scratch. This will ensure you have a clean installation, and it will also allow you to properly install the 2023 and 2024 versions side-by-side in different folders.
No, the perpetual versions do not need to be activated online and they will never expire. You can simply download VUE, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog installers and archives, install them without being asked for any license key by the installer, and you will be good to go.
Floating licenses are no longer available because they require an RLM license server to work. Since the licensing system has been removed completely from the applications, floating licenses have become obsolete.
If you own a floating license for your organization, you may simply install the perpetual versions of VUE and PlantFactory as local installations on as many machines as you would like. This is much easier than setting up and administering a floating license server.
No, the licensing system has been removed. PlantCatalog plants now work automatically within VUE and PlantFactory and do not require a separate activation key. If you activated the license previously, the license key can still be viewed in the “Help” menu, but it will no longer be needed to access the software.
Also, there is no need to redownload the PlantCatalog archives. Instead, make sure to install the perpetual versions of VUE and PlantFactory to disable the licensing system in both the standalone applications and the plugins.
Yes, you can download the entire PlantCatalog collection for free and use it with VUE, PlantFactory, or other applications, provided you update your VUE and PlantFactory installations to the perpetual builds. Just download and unzip all plant archives to get the full collection. Each archive contains a self-extracting installer that will install the plants into a shared folder between VUE and PlantFactory. The next time you open any of the two programs, the plants will appear automatically in the content browser, ready to be used in your projects.
PlantCatalog Exporter is no longer available since it was a “lite” version of PlantFactory. Simply download PlantFactory instead and open, customize, and export PlantCatalog plants from there. PlantFactory offers all the capabilities of PlantCatalog Exporter, in addition to giving you all the tools to create your own models from scratch or to make changes to the existing PlantCatalog models. You will find all published parameters and presets on the “Presets” tab in PlantFactory.
When you download PlantFactory, the installer will also include the PlantFactory integration plugins you already have from your previous purchase.
Yes, all of the plugins are included in both VUE and PlantFactory installers.
Unfortunately, the live sync and connectors to Omniverse had to be removed to make the software available for free. While we regret that we had to remove a feature, the high frequency of changes by NVIDIA to their libraries and Omniverse platform would have meant maintaining ongoing development of the connectors and live sync mechanisms after every new update NVIDIA would issue. Without further development of the e-on products, there would be no solution to keep the connection to Omniverse up and running.
Recommended system specs:
- Windows 64 bit (Windows 8, Windows 10, or Windows 11), macOS 10.14-12*
- Multi-core CPU (Intel Core I7, I9, AMD Ryzen or Mac Pro), AVX compliant
- 8GB+ of RAM
- 4GB+ of free Hard Disk space (on the drive hosting the OS)
We recommend a graphics card containing at least 4 GB of VRAM with a 3D Mark score of 10,000 or better.
Compatible hosts:
- Autodesk MAYA 2019-2023 (Win/Mac) (Maya 2024 is supported by VUE & PlantFactory 2024)
- Autodesk 3ds Max 2019-2023 (3ds Max 2024 is supported by VUE & PlantFactory 2024)
- Maxon Cinema 4D R20-2023 (Win/Mac)
- Newtek Lightwave 11.6-2020 (Win/Mac)
- Unreal Engine 4.26-4.27 & 5.0.-5.1 (5.2 & 5.3 are supported by PlantFactory 2024 on Windows only)
Compatible render engines:
3ds Max:
- V-Ray 6 and older for 3DS Max (Hybrid rendering & conversion tool)
- Arnold for 3DS Max (Conversion tool)
- Redshift 3.0.46 and up (from 3DS Max 2023 and up) (Conversion tool)
Scanline & ART renderer (Hybrid rendering)
Maya:
- V-Ray 6 and older for Maya (Hybrid rendering & conversion tool)
- Arnold for Maya (Conversion tool)
- Redshift 3.0.46 and up (in Maya 2020 and up) (Conversion tool)
- Renderman for Maya (Conversion tool)
- Maya Software renderer (Hybrid rendering & conversion tool)
Cinema 4D:
- V-Ray 6 and older for C4D (Conversion tool)
- Arnold for C4D (Conversion tool)
- Redshift 3.0.46 and up (available from C4D R23 and up) (Conversion tool)
- C4D standard and physical renderer (Hybrid rendering & conversion tool)
*Please note that VUE and PlantFactory 2023 will run on the ARM based Apple computers only through Rosetta 2. A native ARM Mac version is available for VUE and PlantFactory 2024.
The native ARM version was in the works for VUE 2024 and PlantFactory 2024 when development was halted. We decided to supply the ARM version “as is” as an unfinished beta version. Please be aware that the Mac versions for non-ARM systems will probably be more stable than the unfinished ARM versions, which is why we also supply them as an alternative.
For VUE 2023 and PlantFactory 2023, only non-ARM Mac versions are available, which have to be run through Rosetta 2.
Network Rendering
You can use and install RenderCows on any machine you want to use for network rendering. There is no longer a limit to how many RenderCows you may use.
Yes, RenderNodes are now free and can be installed from the VUE installer on as many machines as needed.
Yes. The free RenderNodes plugin is compatible with network rendering within other host applications such as Maya, 3ds Max, or Cinema 4D and can be installed from the VUE installer on as many machines as needed.
No. The licensing system has been removed completely and a license server is no longer required to use RenderNodes.
Support
The e-on software YouTube channel will remain online as an archive. It hosts lots of tutorials for VUE and PlantFactory, including tutorials about the new features in the 2024 release.
You can access the channel here.
Please email Bentley at [email protected] and we will get back to you.
Unfortunately, as the products are no longer developed, hotfixes will not be provided. If Bentley discovers a critical security vulnerability in one of the products, we may release a patch at our sole discretion.
Legacy Licenses and Cornucopia3D
Please email Bentley at [email protected] and we will get back to you with the compatibility key. Please include your “hostID” in the ticket, which can be found in the “Help – Legacy Content Compatibility” menu in VUE or PlantFactory, so that the key can be generated. After you have received the key, you can load it into VUE and PlantFactory with the same menu entry. Upon loading, the apps will decrypt the key for you and generate a new key file, which will then work permanently for any new installation on any machine. Make sure you backup this decrypted key for future installations.
Please note: Generating Legacy License Compatibility Keys is a service we still offer, but we can end it any time without notice.
This is unfortunately no longer possible.
Please email Bentley at [email protected] and we will get back to you with the activation key. Please include the “INST-code” in the ticket, which VUE and PlantFactory will show you when you try to activate the legacy product after installation.
Reactivating legacy licenses is a service we will offer only during a temporary grace period, until August 30th, 2024. After this date, this service will no longer be available.
We highly suggest you migrate to the free 2023 and 2024 versions, as these versions offer many improvements and features not available in the legacy builds.
If you request a Legacy License Compatibility Key during the grace period (see above), you will be able to move all your purchased content across to the free versions, making the use of the legacy versions unnecessary.
Please go to your account through https://store.e-onsoftware.com/login.php to download any invoices, legacy builds, and legacy license keys you require.
Accessing old accounts will be available during a temporary grace period, until August 30th, 2024. After this date, you will no longer be able to access your account or any associated downloads and documents.
