Even though I love Bryce, I'm considering upgrading my older Vue to the latest version to be able to directly load pz3 files. You can never have too many tools. :) But all I know is that Vue loads 'em. I don't know any other details. How much fiddling must you do of your Poser stuff in Vue? and an important question: Does Vue handle textures on subdividing mats? What are the caveats? What works, what doesn't? Thanks!

Spit, I'm interested in the answers as well, since I am looking at Vue 4/Mover 4 as an animation rendering solution to replace Poser 5.

P4 works great with it. I've not had any problems with transparencies, etc. P5 doesn't. Vue looks for a P4 installation and if you don't have it, it won't load the .pz3 file. Also transparencies from P5 don't load correctly (at all). P5 specific materials also won't load. P5 hair won't work. I believe Vue has announced support for P5 coming soon. That will make me very happy. I loved doing all the posing and mats in P4 and rendering in Vue. Now I'm working mostly in P5, and just building the backgrounds in Vue (or Bryce).

I use both ProPack (which I assume works okay?) and P5. But stuff for exporting I always use ProPack for. P5 hair doesn't export to anything at all. Anyone tried subdividing mats?

Oh, nice! Love the lighting in that one. So you don't have to fiddle any settings for the textures? Sounding better and better!

Yes, it sounds good, but my experience is that you then lose the advantages of a good rendering application. I tend to ignore the materials in Poser4 altogether, import to Bryce, and do all the texturing there, because the material editor is so much more powerful than Poser's. If you import a pz3 file into Vue, you can't access the material zones in the same way as you can with a grouped obj file, so you are stuck with whatever imports from Poser.

What kinda pants are those?

Spit,No you don't have to fiddle at all with the settings(nice,very nice)...everything is just as it was in Poser. However,if you want to ...you can alter,edit,add,change,or do whatever you wish with the PZ3 textures useing the Vue material editor.You are in no way "stuck" with anything. SWAMP

Attached Link: Nadya

The pants are a subdividing mat that comes with Bishoen from Daz. There's also some free subdividing mats here in freestuff. It assigns different materials to various body parts so you can texture them seperatly. V3 looks as though it was sesigned with this in mind. Mike 2 and Vicky 2 have a few jaggies where some body parts come together, so you don't get a perfect seam (hip to abs and neck to chest). The lines on V3 are very smooth.

Nice, Hawkfyr! Now what were the render times? I like the soft shadows in the Vue one.

Phantast, exporting from Poser to Bryce can be done two ways. One way gets body parts, the other the material zones. So I choose one or the other depending on what I plan to do in Bryce (makes it very flexible). Are you saying it's just body parts to Vue? no material zones? or?

Thanks Spit, Actually the render time increase in Vue was not that much considering I rendered it larger and with alot of volumetric lights and effects. I don't recall the exact times but the Vue render took about 30 to 45 minutes. I'll still probably explor that image some more.It was just a test render for the Beta. Thanks again Tom

I've never had a problem at all with importing .pz3 files from P4 into Vue 4. In fact, I think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread! All the materials are intact and the mesh is even smoother than it is if imported as an .obj file. Laurie

Thanks all...you have been very very informative. My assumption is that Vue will handle pz3 files from ProPack the same as P4. Hope that's not a wrong assumption. Got a birthday in another month and think I'll take the plunge. Thanks again!

heyas; you can double-check on the vue forum if v4 supports pro pack. and you CAN edit the material on imported pz3s. the easiest way is to access the material summary doohickey and scroll through until you find your UpperEyebrow and SkinHead and whatever else you want to mess with. you can also select an object (prop or body part) and split it by material, if you need to directly access that particular material segment of the mesh.

Sounds good. thanks. I'll check out that forum too.

Thanks to Spit for creating the thread and thanks to everyone else for their answers. Has anyone used Mover 4? If so, then what is the number of frames in an animation and the resolution? And have you used the "Render Cow" for network rendering?

thet = that

Thanks for the info hawkfyr. Have you ever had Vue fail to complete an animation render? I'm not able to get Poser 5 to render a 250 x 250 180 frame animation. Ideally, I'd like to render at a higher resolution.

Only had one lock up and that was because I went through the Mover and then realized I needed to go back and tweak a setting(look ahead).and it kinda locked up on me. Actually I think I was trying to give it too many commands at once and it was more of a shortcoming of my system(Memory specifically). One thing nice about Vue is the import .pz3 files from Poser 4(but not Poser 5 yet as mentioned above)and that includes importing animations from Poser. Have you tried useing different codecs?(divX specifically)? I've not tried any animation in Poser 5 yet(too scared...lol)so I can't be of much help there. Tom

Oh Super!!

I've used Poser and Vue together for a while, and find the imports of pz3 to be great. But you do have to nudge some material settings; the bumps. Vue reads Poser bump maps, but they usually end up with a value that's way-low. For example, a -0.08. On my latest dragon pic in the Poser gallery, I turned the bump up on the different dragon materials to about 1.0 or so. Really makes a difference. You can also mess around with the highlights in the material editor. It's easy to access the separate materials (Vue reads the Poser material template section-by-section) by using the material summary button at the top. Then you can go in and edit what parts you need to.