i modeled a pill bottle in an external 3d app and imported it into vue. the mesh is not smooth (as you can see at the far end of the bottle). what should i set my smooth mesh settings as. i've done some changes to the texture to fix the reflectiing problem on the side. i just want to concentrate on the smoothing. any help would be much appreciated. thanks

Smooth settings won't help. Smooth in this case is about faking the shading so that it looks smother than it is. It's about the same as bumpmapping that fakes bump by adding shading and higlight so that there seems to be bumps when there not really is any in the model. Both bump mapping and the smooth will revel itself when looked from a low angle. Only solution is to add more geometry.

I've had this problem, especially for close-ups. Of course the quickest solution would be to augment the number of polys of the object ... But I found something strange happening with imported objects : depending of the file export/import format, aspect could change tremendously. On the attached screenshots, I exported the same low-res mesh from my 3D app (Rhino..) once in .DXF and once in .3DS. I imported them in Vue4Pro (but it gives the same result with Vue3..). Smothing factor is default 60 in both scenes and number of vertices and polys exactly the same ! (Although the .DXF file size is 33Ko, the .3DS file is 6.77Ko.) I don't know if that can help you.. Paul

In case you're wondering, i modeled the pill bottle in mechanical desktop 6. i cranked up the numbers for the model in mechanical desktop, and i still have the same problem. i think i need to make some different adjustments in mechanical desktop before i export the model.

"Lost in Translation" was the title of a film. And the perfect title here i think. This field is wide. Down to the bottom it has to do with curve descriptions. Wether Vue is not able to read them correctly or the providing software is not able to write them as needed. Both is possible. Even 3DS is not completely standardised so that there are variations. And therefore misunderstandings between software packages. You need to do testings which export format of the software you use for modeling is best for importing into Vue. I sometimes have to do chains. Export it from Cinema in one format, import it into Amorphium (or Amapi or Poser or...) and export it in another format from there again to get good results. It is anoying but who do you want to blame? Indeed, a visual smoothing will not help because the original model (for Vue the imported one is "the original") has not enough facets. What i have sometimes done even is to exchange spline curves (or nurbs) with simple polygons (very fine ones) to be sure that nothing can happen in translation there. That is the effect Paul is talking about. DXF (when i remember it right) does not support any sort of spline curves. So the export filter of the modeling software has to make fine polygon lines out of them while the 3ds contains spline desciptions that Vue misinterpretates.