heyas; well... i wont get into all the details, but i went and ordered vue 5 and the botanica expansion. (nope, can't affor the fancy eco gizmos -- you know, they SAY you can do all that in regular vue, even if you have to place all those trees in a spiral by hand ;) ) it isnt due til friday, though. and although all the stuff i've seen looks killer, i'm still wondering -- how are the clouds? can vue do puff clouds yet?? i saw the lovely puff clouds in siguchi's pic... but those are clouds from the store. i was just wondering.... and hoping :) i cant wait to play with it. maybe it will re-spark my creativity.

sadly enough vue cant do "puffy" clouds at this point straight out of the box, which is what you asked for. You can of course do it yourself but yeah im one more thats hoping that vue will one day be able to do puffy clouds straight out of the box, sadly enough that day isnt here yet :) as for v5I well ecosystems do alot of things your regular good ol vue5 esprit/pro studio cant cope with, if for nothing else thanks to a much better memory management, not to mention it saves tons of time and time is money :)

That's right. Vue cannot do puffy clouds yet. However, ecosystems can be used to get one step closer with spheres and volumetric materials. It is still not perfect - there are still some glitches between spheres. But it is still a lot easier to touch up glitches with painter than paint the whole cloud layer :) Here is a quick test to illustrate puffy clouds with ecosystems.

And here is the final version after more attempts and minor touch up.

agiel.... British Lancasters, flying a daylight mission escorted by American Mustangs? ;)

im sure they said the infinite only automated a lot of tasks that had to be done by hand in regular plain ol' vue. oh well. anyway, how about water? i saw a nice ocean shore image in the vue gallery one e-ons site, and was wondering how they did those nice breakers. i dont suppose there's really ocean breaker terrain and such in there. and my stupid package isnt due til march 21! waaaah!!

No 'ocean' terrain :) The trick is a time controlled fractal node in the function editor of a procedural terrain. Simply connect the 'Time' input to a fractal node (I don't remember which one) and connect the output to the Altitude.

1. Creat Proc.Terrain.
2. Create animation. I mean open the time line. About 4 seconds for instance.
3. At 0, Edit Terrain.
4. Click Zero Edge.
5. Edit function.
6. Change Simple Fractal to Open Ocean, then you'll SmartGraph in action ;-) Altitude is automaticly connected to time!
7. Play with Open Ocean options... make previews.
   Have fun.

Message edited on: 03/16/2005 10:38

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errrr.... that's what I meant :)

:)

For info - when you see the little 'lightning' icon next to a parameter in Vue Infinite screenshots, it means that you can replace that value by it's own graph structure. Meaning that, for example, you can also make the Gain or Choppiness variable depending on position, time, or any combination of nodes in the graph (within some limits). Vue will also tell you what is allowed and what is not when you connect nodes to each other.