Hi The first problem I have is that the preview has quite a considerable amount of poke through this is minimised when rendered. (the scene was one created in P4 and imported.) The second is that when doing a spot render the image 'drops' by about 1/4 of an inch on my monitor, this again is corrected with the final render. I'd also like to say that I agree with the comments about the 'clunky' interface, Iget fed up of having to close the panes down to see most of my image. I haven't tried it yet but I'll try the render on line not circular and see if that speeds things up, as it is I think I'll stick with the import into bryce and render there, much faster. Dave

The poke through on preview could well be corruption on the view from open gl. I noticed I get that on some models, mainly those that are single layered. Way to tell is that the poke through should change as you rotate the camera or character or zoom in and out. The spot render drop I haven't seen though I did get that in Bryce quite a bit. No clue what causes it, except that I guess the screen doesn't always display things as they are. It may also be related to the camera, I'm not entirely sure. Heh, you've got my sympathy on the interface at least, I like the idea behind it, just wish it was somewhat more compact. Studio should be way faster than Bryce. There's a variety of render types to choose from the quickest (or seems that way to me) is the horizontal. So far rendering is pretty quick but it does vary considerably depending on reflections, highlights, shadows, etc etc. Having rendered several things I'm not overly impressed with 3Delight so far, the resultant images seem fuzzy, like they're over-antialiased and there's no option to control that at this time. Also there appears to be some striping or banding on some of the parts. The general fuzzy feeling to finished renders leaves me twitchy for some sort of control over the output. If that remains a case through the beta I will most likely stick with Cinema or Bryce as my final render solution and use studio for other things.

I'm with Questor on the quality of renders under 3Delight. I did some comparison shots between Poser 3 (yeah, I know... it's seriously outclassed...), D|S and Bryce 5. Bryce was hands down the best, but P3 still did a good job on a few of the things I did. I've notcied striping on a few models as well (namely MayaDoll), and some props don't render as smoothly either; Caleb's Puzzle Cube is a good example - in D|S, I can actually see the individual parts that make up the box.

I hated the interface too, until I figured out that I can group all the tags together in one window so I can see what I'm doing. Still, it would be nice to be able to define my window size and not have to hope I get all of what I want when I render (or use render to disk, which I use almost all of the time). I also can't use direct manipulation (maybe my POS puter's too slow to realize what I'm trying to do), so I have to manually select everything and painstakingly move everything with the dials - which I don't mind doing when fine tuning, but I shouldn't have to use all the dials just to move my figure into a position I want to work on.

Now if only I could pose figures and not have the hair wander off somewhere in the distance...

If you right-click (control-click Mac) on the dials you can type in values for rough positioning (I think the units are cm, something real-world metric anyway).

I hadn't realised it was Open GL, but my experience with that is that the Open GL version can make a huge difference. Trouble is, I've had programs work better with an older version. It's a bit of a crap-shoot :(

I wish they would get rid of that window in the lower left corner with the links in it. I already suggested to them that they put those up in the Help menu, like other programs do. That's one more window to clutter the work space. Melanie