CAST Software announces the release of Vivien 2010 Virtual Event Designer

CAST Software have launched Vivien2010 – Virtual Event Designer, available now for download for Members only.

Vivien is an intuitive, 3D event design and sales software designed and built by CAST Software (makers of wysiwyg) for the full spectrum of event professionals who work in the special events and meetings industry. Your computer skills can range from novice to highly advanced. It empowers you to conceive, design, sell, manage, and produce stunning events. By making use of its wide array of tools, onboard Wizards, a library of more than 3000 proprietary industry-specific objects and textures, and the ability to import external files in a variety of formats (including Google SketchUp), individual or multiple users from all areas in an organization can become more professional, more productive and more profitable.

Through the use of Vivien’s accurate 3D images, event planners, designers, venue sales teams, caterers, furniture rental specialists – all can design winning proposals, customize and brand to sell more spaces, quickly respond to RFPs and generate faster turnaround from customers to allow these professionals to do and sell more.

Vivien is easy to use, based on familiar Windows functionality, with the same drag & drop, cut, copy and paste functions as programs like Microsoft Word.

Vivien creates stunning photo realistic “pictures” of future events, providing clear plans for subcontractors to facilitate easier communication between event planners and subcontractor and venues, as well as renting inventory. A variety of file formats can be imported and exported, generating the proper, accurate information for every involved party.

Vivien is the ideal tool for:

• Planners: independent professionals or firms, corporations, non profits/associations
• Services: design, consulting, marketing, advertising, security, limos
• Venues: event sites, hotels, clubs, halls, arenas, banquet and meeting halls, etc.
• Corporations for events, meetings, seminars; religious and political organizations, industry associations, educators, venues and rental spaces
• Caterers: catering, bar, people flow, safety and local fire code
• Renters: event and party rental companies, furniture, place settings, games, etc.
• Techies: technical services, lighting, A/V, special effects
• Entertainers: entertainment companies, acts, musicians

New features in Vivien2010 include:

• Improvements to texturing which allow you to wrap images around 3D surfaces such as spheres, cylinders, and cones.
• Regional Profiles which allow you to specify your location in the world. For example, if you set your region profile to Europe, the units and rulers in your file now automatically change to Metric values.
• New font capabilities allow you to specify any TrueType font so you can bold, underline and italicize to stylize to your preference.
• Vivien2010 supports importing of SketchUp files created in Version 7.0.
• Visualization has been advanced to improve the visual accuracy of our Virtual Views. Light beams illuminate your events and light up objects in the path, and our new shadow system calculates when the beam stops so shadows are added automatically in the scene making it really virtually real!
• New smoke controls have been introduced to allow you to specify direction, speed and density of atmospheric smoke added to your scene.
• New point light source simulation delivers better representations for candle lighting, candelabrum and chandeliers.
• Time of Day Simulation – Just as you can simulate outdoor lighting when setting up your renderings in the Render Wizard, you can now achieve the same effect in the Virtual View for all events that take place outside. Simply use the Outdoor Lighting tab of the Virtual View’s View Options window to choose the date, time of day, and sky condition (cloudy or clear). The Virtual View adjusts accordingly, in realtime.
• Object Smoothing – There are no ragged edges appearing on a cylinder or a person in the library. All of these items appear with smooth surfaces.
• Background Render Manager is a new program bundled with the Vivien installation allowing you to submit to it your rendering jobs. It will run independently from Vivien or even on another computer on your office network, so you can use additional hardware resources to render while you continue to work on your proposals in Vivien.

The all-new Vivien2010 is the sales, planning, design and production solution specially designed for the meeting and special events industry. It builds on the success of Vivien 2.0, 15 successful years of software development history, and delivers many new features and visualization meaning your visions will virtually match reality.