Making new materials from scratch is easy, i was just wondering why vue's own procedurals tend to look so horrid most of the time. I though some one might have had the reciepe on realistic materials.

I have those tutorials that you had linked to. To bad that others do not provide more in depth ideas on how to create more photo-real surfaces within vue only. I more or less mastered Genetica 2.5 but i thought why could one not do the same in Vue's material editor but i have looked into all of the materials that came with the software and honestly i tend to believe i can get more detail and realism out of Genetica. In fact some of my own work will be in 3D World Magazine for Feb 2007 on the CD.

The one problem with image mapped textures is repeats sense they are not procedural once they are exported outside of the software that was used to create them. So any vista-like scene would have to be very well layered to avoid that repetative pattern although this should not be necessary.