What i really miss in Vue is a particle system. What is your prefered method to use smoke, dust, fire? I tried volumetric materials but the result was not good. Pearhaps i've missed some important settings in render, material?

Spectral clouds. Move the spheres around to change the shape for smoke / dust. Just change the color generators for fire.

Most particle work in Vue is done in post; particularly once you get past things you can make the clouds do. Head over to wondertouch.com and check out Particle Illusion. They just released a new demo version that does the app a bit more justice.

Am I missing something about 'spectral clouds'?

They seem to be only large spheres with volumetric cloud textures applied to them.

I was doing that already before.

/scratches head

What is different about them, then just a bunch of pre-made spheres with clouds and stuff added to them?  I feel like I am missing out on something.

farkwar,

Indded you are missing something here.  Vue 6 contains 2 new kinds of cloud types:

1. Metaclouds - which are similar to the old sphere/volumetric formula of Vue 5 except that they contain much better volumetric calculations and capability

2. Spectral Clouds - These are infinite cube planes which stretch across the entire atmosphere and are adjusted in the atmosphere editor

This is what i hate: clouds, spheres. When i want something more complex (for example scene with dust and burning tank - fire+smoke), it is very difficult to set up perfectly. I'm not so good in postwork, it never seems natural.

It seems to me that Vue needs Voxel based 3D-Surfaces but what about Vues' Hyper-Textures? Can one not create fire, smoke and other thick volumetric effects with this feature alone.

Perhaps Vue in a future version needs something like this.

http://www.cebas.com/products/products.php?UD=&PID=47

Yes, this Pyrocluster 3.0 looks great