Originally released in the 1990s under the name Vue d'Esprit, Vue was one of the first ready-made tools for creating 3D environments. As its toolset expanded, it allowed users to generate 3D terrain, embellish it with 3D plants, add sky and clouds, and render the results either within Vue itself or in DCC applications it integrated with through plugins, ultimately including 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, and Unreal Engine.
By the 2000s, it was being used in various industries, including animation, visualization, and VFX, by studios such as DreamWorks Animation, Industrial Light and Magic, and Weta Digital. In the early 2010s, Vue was joined by PlantFactory, a new application for creating 3D plants. In 2015, e-on, the company behind Vue, acquired Bentley Systems, a developer of engineering tools, which now distributes its real-time architectural visualization software LumenRT.
Less popular e-on products, such as the Carbon Scatter surface distribution plugin and the CloudFactory Ozone atmosphere creation plugin, were discontinued two years later. Updates to Vue and PlantFactory became less frequent, exacerbated by a cyberattack in 2017 on the product's website and the Cornucopia 3D asset store, which was permanently shut down as a result. The following year, Bentley made Vue and PlantCatalog available by subscription only, with an Enterprise subscription priced at $990 per year ultimately including the PlantCatalog library, set to be released in 2020.
In a statement on its website announcing the decision to cease development of digital nature products, the company writes:
"For over 39 years, Bentley has focused on serving engineers and other professionals responsible for designing, constructing, and operating sustainable infrastructure.
"To maintain our focus, we have decided to cease sales of Vue, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog. The software will not be further developed, and support will be limited to critical security fixes."
The new perpetual licenses for Vue and PlantCatalog eliminate the need for online software activation and never expire. Both applications are licensed for commercial use, and 3D plant models created with PlantFactory can be sold online for commercial purposes. PlantCatalog assets can also be used in commercial projects, including embedding them in games, but the new EULA prohibits the resale of the models themselves. The PlantCatalog Exporter, used to export PlantCatalog assets to other DCC applications, is not included in the free download, but this can be done using PlantFactory itself.
The free downloads include integration plugins for Vue and PlantFactory for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, LightWave, Maya, and Unreal Engine, but not the Connector plugins for live synchronization with NVIDIA's Omniverse platform, as the collaborative platform "often undergoes changes."
Bentley has also lifted restrictions on network rendering, allowing the installation of Vue rendering nodes on an unlimited number of machines. None of the products will receive support or fixes, although if Bentley "detects a critical security vulnerability in one of the products, it may issue a fix at its discretion." The software has not been made open source, and the EULA prohibits other developers from reverse engineering or decoding it. Users with old accounts have until August 30, 2024, to request a compatibility key, which unlocks their software and allows them to install it on new machines.
The download includes Vue 2023 and PlantFactory 2023 - the current stable releases of the software, as well as working builds of Vue 2024 and PlantFactory 2024, which were apparently in development when Bentley decided to cease the release of these products. The PlantCatalog download files include all releases between PlantCatalog 2019.1 and 2023.3.
Vue and PlantFactory 2023 and 2024 are compatible with Windows 8 and above and macOS 10.14-12.0. The integration plugins are compatible with 3ds Max 2019-2023, Cinema 4D R20-2023, LightWave 11.6-2020, Maya 2019-2023, and Unreal Engine 4.26-5.1. PlantFactory 2024 also supports Unreal Engine 5.2-5.3.
The software is free to download, including for use in commercial projects, in accordance with the end-user license agreement (EULA). PlantCatalog 2023.3 assets can be exported from PlantFactory to standard 3D file formats, including FBX, Alembic, and USD, for use in other DCC applications and game engines. Plant models can be used in commercial projects, including games, but cannot be resold online.