I bought Seatraveler at Renderosity. It's a great model. I loaded it into Poser Propack, but I had a terriable time trying to light it. I loaded it into Vue5 Infinate and I was able to light it ok. The model looks like a red silliuate. When I try to move in close to get the view point from the deck, it become a black cube and I can't tell where I'm at. Manuvering is difficunt, very small movements has the model jump on the screen. Sometime my adjustments seem to go crazy. I pull the ship toward me and suddenly it will jump back.

I guess what I'm asking is; Can I get more control of my adjustments, is there a way I can see what I'm doing in Vue? Is there a secret about how to adjust the lighting in Poser? What the best way to handle things? Hellllpppp!

I was thinking of putting figures on deck in poser, saving the ship and the figures together as a 3ds file and opening it in Vue, or do I have to save the figures seperately and place them on the deck in Vue?

Can anyone please help, I'm sure Poser,  the model and Vue are great, I'm just inexperienced. 

I have a PC with XP- 1.50 GB of memory, and 3GHZ of speed.

what version of vue are you using!!! because you shouldn't be saving poser characters/figures/props as a 3ds file!!! instead just save it as a pz3!!! be sure to import your ship first(in poser) before importing figures,otherwise they(props) will sometimes parent themselves to a figure on import!!!(so if you move an arm,the ship might move aswell) you'll never render a multi-figure scene in poser,so i'd go with the vue render!! but you could create the whole people on deck scene in poser!!!then import it into vue and light it!!! somebody else may be able to help better but you need to say which version of poser and vue you are using!!!!!!!!!

Hi Vince3. The part of the title of this thread is PROPACK, which is Poser4 with propack, VUE 5 INFINITE, which is the version of Vue that I'm using. I also mention the versions of these two programs in the first two lines of my explaination of the problem. Is there something I'm missing?

The reason that the Seatraveler Ship is 3ds, is because that the way it is sold. It comes as a 3DS and Object file.

I guess what I'm asking is; Can I get more control of my adjustments, is there a way I can see what I'm doing in Vue? Is there a secret about how to adjust the lighting in Poser? What the best way to handle things?

Thanks for your suggestions. 

Import the 3DS figure into Poser.  Then save the figure as a Poser pz3 file.
Then import the pz3 file into Vue Infinite.  Vue Infinite handles Poser files
best as pz3 files because it keeps all the textures and poses.

I have the Seatraveller, I bought it originally to use in Poser but I didn't have enough RAM for it.

Everyone seems to have missed your point so far!

Two things: To use it in Poser you will need at least 2 Gig of RAM and even then it will be slow because it is a "HUGE" model and I'm not even sure it will run properly in Propack anyway, something in the back of my mind tells me it's only for P5 and above [could be wrong on that], but without enough RAM you will struggle with this model.

Now the good news: Seatraveller workd great in V5I, I have used it in there to it's full potential, the internal scenes of the ship should be accessible fairly easily using the camera controls in the World Browser, failing that it is in pieces in Vue that you can isolate and enlarge for better control although I prefer to use the camera controls. The ship comes as an OBJ and 3DS, you should use the 3DS version for import into Vue.

The biggest thing with this model though is the amount of RAM in your system, if you've less than 2 Gig then you will have problems!

All I've said is from my own personal experience of this model, others may differ!

I have a PC-XL-1.50 GB-3.0GH

sorry i must of been speed reading again!!!(insert embaressed smiley here) from the sounds of it this model you speak of must be HUGE!!!!!!!!! i had a building prop before that was humongous and i had the same probs with trying to move it about(very slow) plus the parameter dials where all working wrong,so i gave up with it in end!!! but i'm suprised that it is slow it vue,as i have made a scene before that was over 1 billion polygons and wasn't running slow!!!sorry can't help you with propack either as i've only had poser5 and 6!!have you tried asking the maker to see if they can help!!!

3DS import in Poser quite often goes wrong in my experience. Better to load the .OBJ, which is Poser's native geometry format.

For the rest I agree with vince3: create the scene in Poser, and save separate .pz3 files, one with only the ship, and one pz3 per character on the ship. Import a .pz3 in Vue Infinite, fix up the materials, and save as .VOB. If you do this for every .pz3 you can start a fresh scene (Vue 5 Infinite suffers from memory leaks!) and use the .VOB files in the scene.

I've made scenes with over a dozen Poser people (Millenium 3 figs), plus complex props and many rocks and trees this way.

A tip: if you're going to use this ship plus several Poser people, chances are that the people will look fairly small in the final render. A 4000x4000 skin texture is a tremendous waste of resources. dburdick has a tutorial on how to make procedural skin in Vue Infinite - distant figures can use these skin shaders, you'll save a lot on texture memory.
You can also make a scaled down copy of the skin texture using Photoshop or PSP. 1000x1000 is more than enough for a figure that won't be higher than 500 pixels in the final render...

just had a thought!!!(lightbulb moment!!) if you load your ship into vue as pz3,then there are two ways i know of to move things easier(might work ,might not) (1) bring ship into blank scene and then make a new layer!! so that other things you bring into the scene are on a different layer/layers!! and when you need to move the ship or the other objects,you just click on the layers you need to work with,and make the other layers not visible by clicking the little eye symbol next to the layer!!!! (2) not too sure if this one would work though but, you can asign a colour to all the props/figures/blah blah!! so that when you pick and object/figure all other things associated with that figure(colour) will also be highlighted!! don't know if that would speed it up though as i can't remember if it hides the other coloured figures or not!!!!!!!! you could try asking in the vue forum,as someone in there is bound to be able to help!! 'cause i don't think it'll ever render in poser!!! anyway lightbulb is dimming now!! hope that helps!!!!!!!

Some how I'm not making myself clear. The only problem I have in Poser is the lighting. I can see the ship, it moves fine, but I done know how to light it, so you can see the deck and things when rendered.

The Ship loads fine in Vue5 Infinite, and it renders fine.

The problem with moving the model is not that it's slow, it is eratic, I would pull the ship closer and it would suddenly jump back. The opposite is true, small camera moves on my part has the ship moving too quickly.

The ship was on a seperate layer, I normally do that anyway.

The figures are not suppose to be distant, I'm trying to do a close up of the figures on the deck of the ship. That brings me to my second problem. I can't see the detail on the ship to place and light the figures. The ship is a solid red or it's a large black box. I need to see the ships deck.

I do appreicate everyones imput, I just wish I could explain my problems better.

Not being able to see the ship while moving in Vue is normal. The amount of polygons is very high. Only a high end professional 3D graphics card (nVidia Quadro series, 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm) can keep up and draw the ship while it's being moved.

Solution: do the positioning in Poser, not in Vue. Rendering and lighting in Poser is difficult or impossible, but you can place the figures on deck without any trouble.
Then use the separate .pz3/vob trick as described. And for high quality skin, you can enhance an existing skin texture using the shader set by dburdick. The commercial version, SkinVue2, available at Cornucopia, does approximately the same thing for skin in Vue as the face_off RealSkinShader does in Poser.

The ship is a solid red image even when it is not moving, the only time I can see the details on the ship is when it's rendered.

"...use the separate .pz3/vob trick as described", which trick was that?

Shader set, there's a shader set for PoserPropack?

Have you tried using wireframe instead of opengl in vue? it should help you move around the scene better.

"pz3/vob trick": I meant setting up the complete scene in Poser, positioning both ship and characters, and then saving out several .pz3 files, one containing the ship, one containing the first character+clothes, one containing the second character+clothes etcetera etcetera.

Each of those .pz3 files can be imported into Vue, materials can be fixed - and I prefer using procedural materials wherever possible, they save a lot of memory - and then saved as Vue .VOB objects. In this stage I do not move/scale any of the imported objects, because they already have the correct relative positions.

Then quit and restart Vue to clear out the memory leaks. Load the .VOBs you created in the previous step, group them, and move them around as needed. I prefer not to move them at all, instead I move around terrains, cameras and infinite plains until I'm content.

The face_off RealSkinShader does not exist for Poser Pro Pack - it requires the more advanced materials of Poser 5 and 6. If you want to see what it can do for skin in Poser, check out the galleries of richardson and UweMattern - you can't render skin like that in straight Poser Pro Pack. dburdick's SkinVue product similarly enhances skin textures in Vue 5 infinite. Even the purely procedural skin version (there are several options in SkinVue) gives a very decent look for midrange/longrange characters, without using a single byte of texture memory.
One of the advantages of using SkinVue (or RealSkinShader) is that you can start with a low resolution texture and use the procedurals to add the required detail. Again, less memory use, so more complex scenes will be renderable.

About not seeing the ship: what kind of graphics card do you have? Your system has enough CPU power and RAM to handle the scene, but if you're using an older low-end graphics card, or a built-in graphics ship like the Intel Extreme Graphics 2, there's a good chance your graphics card is just too slow to do the job.

One final possibility in Vue: you can have Vue display the object as boxes. Usually the display automatically degrades to boxes only when the scene is fairly complex and when you're moving around things, but you can force Vue to always display objects as boxes. Can't remember exactly where that setting is, but it's there.

Hope this helps,

Steven.