New Update, 278257 has been released.

I think I'll....wait and see. ;-)

Hmmmmm....is this another beta, or an UPDATE update? I'll go over to e-on & take a look.

It's a beta.

Did you hear? Doesn't it tick like a bomb? Volunteers... ! ;-) Mazak

I'll go.

I'd try it out, but eon's site won't let me log in. If I try to login, it tells me my password doesn't match. I think I'm going to drop VUE and eon from my list of programs to use.

It usually asks for your password as the Zip or Postal code that was used when shipping the program to you or during registration. If you're in the US, it could be your zip+four code...enter it as it normally appears on your mail including the dash between the zip code and the postal route/carrier number. Took me a couple tries the first time until I looked more closely at what it says and remembered the extra numbers. Kevin

Wish that was the answer. I changed my login name and password to the same one I use at all these sites... easier for the mentally impaired like me.... If I click on the register button, my profile pops right up with all the information just like it should be... still can't login to get the update. eon's site is a RPITFA.... IMO

@ EdW: You might have changed your password when you first logged in at C3D, since they encouraged it quite strongly, ( I know I did). So your E-on password is your C3D password. Hope this helped. So, HAS ANYONE TRIED IT YET??????

So, HAS ANYONE TRIED IT YET?????? <<

No. Just downloaded it.
Have to get some sleep now. Will try tomorrow.

One guy over at the e-on site says Poser dynamic cloth is working now and posted a jpg to prove it. No problems reported at my last glance. Kevin

Well.... I've been using it for a few days.... ;D It doesn't fix every issue, but it is stable, and we had gotten it down to things like 'if I do xxx to yyy at zzz time and do fourteen consecutive armpit farts, I get wierd reaction q'. The Cornucopia content you may have already obtained might or might not work; this is -not- a bug, but the presence of the old keying system. Once the store is open again, you will have to redownload your purchases (and your counter will be reset for this). They are also putting the final touches on packaging the materials and atmospheres in a 'pack' =as= a single download package. Remember, when I say stable, I mean it has behaved on my systems, and in this case, on the systems of the C3D mods who've been testing as well.

Dale, your efforts are appreciated. I've got the new release installed and so far, so good.

Can you describe a few the issues it hasn't got fixed in the new update. This would save a lot from starting a thread blaming e-on for something that is a known issue. :) btw Dale do you have a web site with some your animations on it for public viewing or is most your work client related and not posted on Internet. :) I am going to patiencely wait a couple days before doing the update. Proably wait for store to open and see how it handles it and its content. :)

Well, I'm using it now. A bug I had with incorporated texture maps has been fixed. The terrain editor has all its features working. Haven't tested yet render cows or rendering to disk, which was a pain in you know what before. Haven't tried importing big lwo objects yet either, this was a known bug too. So far; looks good. Haven't got my C3D autumn birch in my plant collection, but at least I don't get an error message when opening the plants collections, asking me to remove this plant. And funnily enough, I can use Creed's fall trees, that are supposed to work only with plants from C3D. So far, so good, then!

The load time for procedural terrains is much longer. Maybe that is one of those armpit farts?

lingrif; That's what I like to hear.... ;) iloco; The Cornucopia purchased items at the moment are very much a hit and miss issue; sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they do strange things like throw parts off to one side when you use them. They are also working on tracking down the issues with the drift in file format standards and seeing if it is possible to stabilize that issue. Python is being expanded a bit, and the rest you'll have to wait on until they get far enough along to feel comfortable talking about it. At the moment I don't have a website; not so much due to client work (which I don't do), but due to the fact that I still consider myself a beginner. Most of what I've done to date has been experimentation, seeing what I can and can't do with my chosen tools. I do have a couple of projects in the beginning stages though, and when I get some footage in the can I plan to have my wife help me set up a site and post some WIPs. lanaloe77; Actually, that's one I haven't heard mentioned. I know they did some work on the memory management, as Hypervue doesn't seem to need as much per Cow as before; this could be a side effect. Or a consequence of the autoregistration debacle. You might want to post this over at e-on's website; the beta 5.08 is not finished by any stretch. E-on decided that it would be best to get a functional update out that at least addressed the majority of the damage the blown updated caused. There are still issues being addressed, and now is the time to point out any that you or others find.

Well, just tried to import a 300000+ polys lwo object and got to famous OOM error! Seems we're not going to use our XFrog trees for a bit longer, Iloco!

Is there any brave sole to test the rendering farm? Dale

That would be me. And it works fine on my configuration. Roderick Davies posted over at the e-on board that he has occasionally gotten an error window on his remote machines with no text; just the box with the ok button on it. A shutdown/restart of the offending Cow fixes the problem. I haven't encountered this myself, so I can't confirm it as an issue. Actually, I hope it -is- a corruption in the Cows from a previous busted update; behavior of this nature usually is symptomatic of a trojan infection....

bruno021; What texture format are you using? If it was tiff, try it again with either bmp or jpg. Something has popped up regarding texture format and light interaction that they are trying to track down. If the change fixes permits the import, send e-on a report on it with specifics.

Yes, Dale, it's tiff, but there's no way I want to change it, since I need the transparency info. Strange though, Vue accepts smaller lwo files, with tiff textures.

I was having issues with xfrog and Vue before the blowup with the version that we had to back off of and start over again. I had tech support ticket but gave up when had to do the rollback. Looks like it will have to be done over again. :) I haven't install new update yet but watching threads to see what problems arise before doing so. :)

Iloco, I had the same problem with the updated we rolled back to as well. Didn't you?

Yes I did a complete reinstall of Vue and went back to Version 5.07-02 Build 277255 of which I am using now. I will be gone 3-4 days so when get back will experiment some with xfrog and the new update. I hope they get this fixed because I use xfrog a lot in my scenes. :) To use workarounds only prolongs the problem and it never gets fixed. If other applications can use the tifs so should Vue. :)

Hmmm...oh, well...looks as if I'm still holding onto my money until E-on can actually fix the LWO,Xfrog import problem. I think we can all live with minor bugs in software, but import bugs are a major setback in any software...especially a graphics software which needs effective import like Vue. Lets hope the final non-beta release resolves this...we mustn't forget this is a Beta. Cheers

Works fine here for what I'm doing.

Is there any brave sole to test the rendering farm? <<

Wish I could get my computers to communicate at all so I coould use the cows. :oP
I've tried "direct connection" using a crossed cable(?). And I've tried through our net. No firewalls or other "blockers" are on. Just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
I have XP home SP1 on one and XP pro SP1 on the other. Could that be it?

Sorry to get off topic. I just get so frustrated.

@ Tiny: you need to configurate your network first from your main computer to the secondary one. XP has an assistant to help you do it. You also need an ethernet cable called RJ45, unless you want to go wireless. Is this the "cross cable" you're talking about? @ Cheers: It's a pretty minor bug, this OOM error message when importing. I only get it with very big meshes, like I said 300 000+ polys, otherwise, it works fine. But still a bug is a bug and this one is really bugging me!

Agreed bruno, but for us XFrog owners (as you mentioned) it is a bit of a pain and a bit ironic when it's bosted that Vue can support billions of polygons. Like I said though, I'm not going to be too hard on E-on yet...it is a beta after all. Cheers

Guess they were talking of virtual billions of polygonal Vue plants and we can't load a single XFrog one because it's too big! And why am I surprised anyway?!!

I use XFrog trees and plants frequently in Infinite, and I do use them in ecosystems. I always rework the leaf and flower textures, because imvho they're very sloppy as they come with the plants. I clean up both the color and alpha maps, and then save them separately as jpg or bmp. I import Xfrog meshes into Infinite as 3ds, and reapply the leaf/flower color and alpha maps, and they look great.

I am rendering right now in Infinite, with the new beta build; one plane with ecosystem; 11,096,249,170 polygons, XFrog adult horse chestnut, medium mugo pine, young austrian pine, and adult shagbark hickory. 54,057 instances. Used my notebook; P4 3.0G, 2G Ram. I have found that Vue seems to prefer it if you save your XFrog vegetation as vob, and load it in that way, but this was XFrog 3ds. I can post a shot of it when it's done, although it's kinda boring, lol! Just a lot of trees from the air.

Message edited on: 09/14/2005 14:00

I can also use some xfrog plants in vue without any problems but I run into some that are a pain in the behind and will not load. One of the cati from SouthWest is one of them and I would ahve to try and load some more to be sure of the others. The simple ones are no problem. Vue should be able to load all of them. I use them converted as 3ds and sometimes lwo. Same problem either way with some the plants. I'd say 85% of my plants I have no problem. Its those that cause the problem is ones I would like to be able to use. Once Vue update goes to a full release and not a beta I will open another tech ticket with e-on. We were working on this but had to roll back so gave up with it. :) I can pick lots of the plants and say I have no problem with them but its the ones that I know for a fact that have problems is what needs fixing. :)

Agree with iloco, most of XFrog plants import OK. I prefer to import in lwo because transparency info is retained in Lwo, for other formats, you need alpha planes, True, 3ds is lighter size wise, but messes with objects/texture names. ( Only 8 characters allowed) Christie, I find your remark about "sloppy" textures strange, I haven't seen it myself, guess I'll have to do some tests.

my 4 Cow farm seems to be rendering but I will not know for sure till it be done, I will repost with the results.

I don't have the southwest plants package, so I can't check that on my system. As far as the textures, I find that with a lot of the leaves, the edges of the textures aren't smoothed out at all, and since they're tiffs, with embedded alpha info, the edges of the alphas are rough as well. I usually do some smoothing and smudging at the edges of the color maps, and then even out the edges of the alpha information, plus I change the background of the color maps to a color closer to the leaf color. That way I don't end up with artifacts around the leaf edges. For an example of what I think is a sloppy map, check the papaya leaf, I think that's one of the worst.

I'll check that Christie, but that's a lot of extra work you're doing! Not sure I want to get into it, unless it's a commissioned work, which rarely happens to me!

@bruno021, Have that (the RJ45) and done that (configured from main computer and followed all the step by steps from MS).
That is why I am confused and frustrated.

Thank you anyhow. :o) I'll give it a try again.

Tiny; Exactly what is your setup like?

Tiny; Exactly what is your setup like? The only time you need a crossover cable is if you are connecting one computer to another via a NIC, and you only use this if there are no other connections involved. If you are trying to run both a NIC and a modem, there is the issue; Windows takes a bit of....convincing....to permit this. And you have to start that convincing at the BIOS level by freeing up as many IRQs as possible (turning off all unused serial and parallel ports, for an example).

More networking stuff:

1. You have to be sharing at least one folder.
2. Usually people use a cheap swith or hub, not crossover cables. I recommend a LinkSys BEF SX-41 connection sharing/router/switch/firewall/DHCP since it does so much so well, for so little $. Nice to have the LEDs for diagnostics too.
3. Can you ping from a command line to the PCs by IP address?
4. Are the LEDs lighted on all the NICs?

1. A Google search will get you lots of step-by-step networking hobby sites.

Message edited on: 09/14/2005 19:54

OK, my first attempt at network rendering since installing the update failed right at the end as the nodes were disconnecting the program did the windows error appology crash that makes you click OK as if you had some part of it. I have only seen this once before and I network render EVERYTHING. I rebooted and I am trying again with a shorter render to see if it will work this time.

Bruno021, So my trees work??? That's cool!!! If any one else wants to give it a try just reply here and I'll post a link to them. I deleted them out of the free stuff section because they weren't working. Jim

Yes, Jim they work! And Vue won't even load my c3d tree, but reads yours!

The C3D trees pretty much -don't- work at the moment...although they might. They are having to rebuild the C3D content to get the old autoregistration scheme out of it, and you'll need to redownload your purchases when the store reopens.

Thanks Dale, I had read this already, what I meant is Creed's fall trees only work with the autumn with birch from C3D, which I downloaded but couldn't load in Vue, with error messages asking me to remove it. Now Creed's trees load fine which is odd, but so cool!

My terrain taking forever to load problem when using the editor is due to the resolution size of the terrain. All is well now.

Ok, more about XFrog imports. I sent tests to E-on's Tech support regarding the issue. And Dale B was right the problem is tiff textures, but only the ones with embedded transparency. They just make Vue crash. Period. Nothing to do about it right now. Means you have to modify all your tiffs and make 2 textures out of them: one for the colour channel: add a white layer to your image, place it under the background layer, flaten your image, and save as jpeg. The other one, select the transparent background, reverse your selection, and change the colour to black, save as jpeg too, this one you will load in the transparency channel in Vue. These operations are done in PS or PS Elements, but I guess can be done more or less the same way in another paint proggie. Oh, and you'll need to apply the new color map within XFrog, otherwise your leaves will look square, if you used squares for leaves in Xfrog that is, which we generally do. You will also need to change the size of your leaves in XFrog, since the now white part of the leaf texture is part of the leaf, and so the leaf will be smaller when you load the transmap in Vue. A lot of unnecessary work, and I hope this will be fixed very soon, if not yesterday!

Today I loaded up an old Vue4Pro scene that I wanted to redo. It had Xfrog Mugopines in it - leaves rendered like boxes. I just went into the materials editor, reselected the tiff file and resaved the object. All is well now. It had embedded transparency.

Also, I bring my xfrog trees in as .3ds. For the leaves, I do the same as I posted before. Just go into the material editor on the leaves and reload the .tif. I get a message saying that there is alpha material and do I want to use it as a transparency. I say yes and I have my xfrog tree. Don't have to go into a paint program.

So Vue is not broken regarding Xfrog trees and tif files with an alpha channel?

Message edited on: 09/16/2005 00:19