I ws ready to spend about $500+ to get the great Xfrog plant bundle I wanted, with Xfrog Lite, but after playing with Xfrog 3.5 30 day demo and import attempts with Vue 4.12 I had to cancel my order. Obviously, if a rumored 4.0 version of Xfrog comes out it MUST address these transparency mapping issues for Vue, Poser, etc. users if Xfrog wants to have more people buy their software and plant bundles. I did finally figure out that by remapping the Xfrog TIF files as 32bit TGA's, applying each part first to a Vue Alpha Plane, and then copying that to the correct plant part (which is in German, making it even more difficult) I could finally get a simple baby banana plant to render correctly. But what a HASSLE! Xfrog 4.0 needs to export the correct OBJ, LWO and 3DS files for Vue and Poser (which is no big technical deal folks) before they will be selling any plant bundles to me! To bad, because they are great looking plants!

Attached Link: http://www.orio.cc/tutorials/xfrogvue4/xfrog2vue4.htm

VUE reads the XFrog TIF files and imports them correctly, all you need to do is set the "global transparency" to max, set the "varaiable transparency", edit "transparency function" -> set to "mapped" and use the texture as map (more on these basic steps can no doubt be found in the manual) and Bob's your aunty. Since there are usually only 2 or 3 different leaftextures, it isn't that much work, a minute at the max for a tree (image is a 30 sec gerbera). The main pain is VUE trying to import a large OBJ file, most of the time a 3DS will do as well at a 1/3 of the filesize. There is an English language demo, with tree and treepartnames in English , you can even download a manual in English.

Expect XFrog 4 to be aimed even more at the pro tools like Maya, 3DMax, LW & C3D , the fact that VUE & Poser users are able to use some of the export options is nice and no more than nice for those VUE & Poser users.

Attached a link to Orio's XFrog -> VUE tutorial

Thanks for the note, hein. I was having the same trouble. I'm also not satisfied with the distortion tools, as they seem pretty "clunky." But I do really very much appreciate the folks at greenworks making the 30 day trial version available. (And, I did pop for the Japanese Tree set.) Veritas should have mentioned that the price is only $300 - not more than $500. But I don't think I'll be purchasing it either, maybe not, ...still debating. .... I'd like to be able to bend the trees in Xfrog, in a local manner as I choose, instead of having to move the completed model to another package to really get the job done. A file explorer viewer for the texture files would help a lot, too.

Orio's tutorial is very helpful, but I had previously discoved a lot of this by my own trial and error. I didn't know about using the material summary to update ALL the materials at once. That's a neat and very useful trick! Obviously these are great looking plants and I am very impressed with how accurate they are. Howewever, I would really wish that Xfrog could become the POSER of the plant world, and that it could be as relatively easy to use as Poser is. I think the guys at Greenworks are tecnical wizards but they need to upgrade the interface and file exports. Then it would be a fantastic program and they would sell LOTS of plant bundles and software to people who aren't techie-types. I think lots of people would buy and use an Xfrog-Poser program and the market for new plant models would expand tremendously! BTW, the plant bundle I was looking at was the ASIAN plant bundle. If you buy it (and I checked around among the Xfrog dealers) that bundle, WITH Xfrog Lite, is a little of $500! You must have Xfrog Lite as a minimum to use the plant models, as they don't work "out of the box ((the CD)). If Greenworks is going to sell these model sets they SHOULD improve the XFROG software. I hope they will, as I think they would see a major new market grow for them if they took a look at an Xfrog-Poser concept.