I was JUST starting to put together a render for the July "beam of light challange", and was only 15 min's into it and this is what happened. There is only 3 elements in this so far. The ground with the standard "Wavy water" mat applied to it, the all black silhouette of the boat, and the beam of light shown in the position of the first pic. What the hell is this? there is nothing for the light to be interacting with to explain this effect. If you want the original file I will send it to you. e-mail me at mds3000@hotmail.com.

First off... make sure you have the latest version of vue (4.1 now). There used to be a problem when a volumetric light was pointing directly to the camera and the camera was looking at it. I had that problem in one of my images. I don't know if this has been fixed yet ...

sorry I did not make myself clear. I was not really complaining. ;)~ and also the light and the camera are pointing in the same direction. this might help anyone else who looks at it. thanks for responding agiel.

Well, I rather like the way it looks, even if it wasn't what you wanted. And when I looked at the render before I read your texture (with only a brief glance at the unrendered screen shot), I thought it was a killer whale. Kevin

Yes, it looks strange... And I agree with MeInOhio to say that your boat looks, in this render, like a whale. Probably when you problem will be fixed, it will look like you wanted to... :-)

That's whatI like about Vue..funny sometime. Create 'arts' that never before seen somtime...LOL! Have a good one! Bill

You are talking about the curved light right? What it looks like, is some sort of invisible round boolean object in there. I don't see it on the scene, but maybe there is a hidden one on the ship. Do a 180 of the ship and see if the bend in the light moves.

When I was working on the fire challenge I notice some of my unseen boolen difference objects would indeed cast shadows and block light even if I turned off the accepting or casting shadows. Was strange. Maybe something along those lines is causing this. :)

Was a good theroy Nightvoice but I deleted the boat out of the scene after rotating failed and it was still there. Thank you. And again all I am not upset with this, I was just wondering if someone understood what happened and if maybe it could be duplicated intentionaly. ;)~ It is a REALLY cool effect!

Oh well. :) It is interesting effect though. :)

I have a volumetric bug I found as well that i'm going to show after the contest. So there seems to be a few bugs with the volumetric system. :)

I don't know if this is the same thing, but here is what happens to me when I use water. These strange lines appear in the terrain. I got Vue about 6 months ago, and this scene was what I made while doing the tutorial. It is also the reason I just stopped using Vue because I was so disappointed in it! Took 7 minutes to render a picture that is clearly defective. BTW, I just rendered this image after upgrading to Vue 4.1, so that didn't fix it. In my render options I have "final" selected with anti-alias turned ON. If anybody can explain these lines and tell me how to avoid them, I'd give Vue another try, but so far, I consider it a totally useless product.

Yes! As you can see in the pic I posted above you can see the same line and it does seem to be right in line with the light where it creates that weird effect. Hummmmm? I wonder? ;0`

Those lines have always been there in the water from what I can tell. I always took those to be bad textures that are not very seamless or something like that. :) Always just edited those out with photoshop. However, when you wrap those water textures onto a terrain instead of a flat plane it seems to hide/them better. :)

I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the ground texture itself, because the same texture is on the terrain above the water as well as below, and there are no lines above the water. I think the water has no texture map, just a process, so it has to be something else.

Those lines thingy has be a pain all the while and I'm not sure if anything has been done to better it after so many Vue 4 upgrades. In earlier post many months ago, it was mentioned that it has something to do with the "filter". You can tweak around or play with it till you get what is right for you...something I do not pay for. IMHO...I rather do the correction in a Paint program rather than fiddling with it not knowing what you are getting in the end. One thning for sure, even you get rid of the line, you likely to find things different.

ronstuff, there is nothing "defective" with this material. VUE's "default water" always produce lines like these ones. They are caused by the "wave" layer of the bump production function.

The "default water" material has a bump production made of 2 functions : a wave and a noise layer. On the picture above you can see the isolate "wave" function and it's noticeable "lines".

If you want to remove the lines, simply delete this layer or replace it with another one. You could also remove them by filtering the bump production (with a round clip 95% bicubic for example).

:) Eric

Great heads up on knowing your program audity! I can use that info myself. But, does it explain the weird way the light is reacting in my pic way at the top or do you have a better explination for that, if any! :)~

Audity: First of all, I didn't say that the material was defective. My exact statement was "a picture that is clearly defective" -- If you wish to quote somebody, please quote them accurately. I still believe that this image generated by Vue 4 is defective. So until somebody shows me a location on this planet where the water has wavy lines in it, I will continue to believe that. After considering what you have said, I probably should change my statement to "VUE ITSELF IS DEFECTIVE!" because NOW I don't believe that it is the material either. (see the image above) This is the bump production function of the "Default Water" in my version of Vue. It sure don't look much like yours, and I don't see any isolated massive "spikes" in the procedural values themselves that might indicate a hard line in the material generated. In addition, I believe that Vue generates other "artifacts" (for lack of a better term) when it renders pictures - for example, the strange behavior of the lighting in lgp692000's example, which I believe is a related problem in Vue, which is not easily dismissed by laying blame on the material. I believe that these artifacts are produced by the rendering engine (probably an unwanted "harmonic" or "rounding error" of the procedural function caused by mathematical sloppiness), and even though they may be "masked" by altering the materials, the fundamental flaw of the engine itself is still there. If this were not the case, I think e-on would have fixed it if they could, but altering the "core" of the program itself would just be too difficult and costly. Sorry if I burst anyone's bubble or stepped on any toes, I just call them the way I see them. I like Vue well enough to use it occasionally and give it another try, but I haven't the patience to fix in post the flaws generated by a program which I paid several hundred dollars for.

Hi ronstuff,

I'm sorry if I misquoted you.

---"This is the bump production function of the "Default Water" in my version of Vue. It sure don't look much like yours".---

The picture that I included was a screenshot of the "wave" function only. If you delete the noise layer, you'll get the same function.

Make at test : delete the "wave" layer and render the picture again. There won't be any noticeable lines.

I entirely agree with you about the problems with the rendering engine. I already said what I tought about it in many other messages... It's a problem that e-on should fix before anything !

:) Eric

I really appreciate your help, Eric. :-) You pointed me in the right direction and I thank you for that! I also discovered a quick fix (at least for the problem in my water) and that was to change layer 2 of the bump function from "Wave" to "Water (calm)" on their list. It generates almost identical water to the default except WITHOUT LINES! - yaaay! Then I saved this new material as "Default Water 2" in my custom folder for future use. I NEVER would have found that solution without your help, THANKS.

I'm glad that I could help !

If you need a general purpose "default water" try this :

1. a bump production with only a "water (calm)" function layer (amplitude : 1).

2. Then enable "fractal transformation" (complexity : 4 - combination mode : blend). The fractal transformation will make the bumps less symmetrical.

This bump production will generates very soft waves.

:) Eric

I also noticed that the invisible part of even a crystal clear material of a boolean difference casts shadows as if it were opaque. Can one remove the unwanted shadow casting "invisible" parts?

I'm sorry to say this, but I made a simple test with a cylinder cutting a cube (both with crystal default texture), and shadow looked OK... Eventually, send a picture for we can see what's the problem... :-) Argentium Thri'ile