I assume that we all use Vue in different ways.
I mean, we all have our own rituals when we put together a render.

So tell me, in what order do you put things on your screen before you start to render?

I usually start with the terrain, paint the eco-system, add water (if I use water in the scene), then
add any models and last I add the atmosphere and tweak until I'm as happy as I can be.

How about you guys?

C - who's got a fish to fry :p

Personally I'll usually start with a terrain but sometimes I do the atmo first!!
Vegetation depends on whether or not I want decay around any objects I'll place later or not so that's pretty fluid because I always end up adjusting it anyway!
Any Poser items are usually loaded last!

Quote -
Any Poser items are usually loaded last!

LOL....yeah...they DO tend to take a lot of resources once they've been imported.

I do the atmosphere first to get the basic feel for the picture. I have a feel in mind and build it from there. The only problem with this is that sometimes atmopsheres take a while to render. But without the initial distibution of light, I can't get the feel. Then as I progress I will modify the atmosphere, add other lights, if necessary, etc.

One of the first things I do is to create a kind of  "pivot". Normally it's just a red cylinder, roughly the size of a human figure, which I use as camera rotation center, as a scale for everything else, as a test object for shadows and light, etc. That object will stay in the scene until the last stages. If the scene has a Poser figure, the cylinder will normally be replaced by that.

The sequence of the rest depends a lot on the kind of image I want to create. The first things to do are the things that will be the focal point. If it's an image with complex terrains, that's normally among the first things to do. If it's an image where the plants are very important, that's the first thing to do. If it's a "moody" image, the atmosphere is the first thing to do. So, I concentrate on what's more important first, also to make a kind of "proof of concept". Sometimes, I have an image in my mind that I fail miserably in putting to screen, by whatever reason. So, no bother in doing anything else if the focal point is not possible to do with my current skill set. I have dozens of folders with projects that I started but that failed on the proof of concept.

For example, in my last image, "My Kingdom", the materials were the most important (the water and the sandy beach). The rest was more or less normal stuff. So, I concentrated on that first and only when I was satisfied, I moved on to do the rest. Because many times the materials depend heavily on the lighting, the atmosphere and the materials were done at the same time, in this case.

Nearly always start with Poser or other main model first, then assemble scene to fit them :)

After I have imported my Poser stuff I will generally work on the atmosphere & lights first. Once I have the basics then I'll build the scene. The last thing that I do is again the atmosphere & lights, fine tuning them before the render.

Quote - Nearly always start with Poser or other main model first, then assemble scene to fit them :)

I do the same. Sometimes, it is an object or character that inspires the creative juices and the scene pops into my head that I try to get Vue to recreate for me.

I usually do the atmosphere and lighting last since complex lighting will many times slow down test renders for placement and perspective.

Paula - That feel you're talking about...I don't get that until the scene is set and I begin to tweak the
atmosphere. I rarely know in beforehand what I want to create.

Rutra - well, it sure works :D Those island of yours are absolutely stunning :)) (And I still want
to buy one...hehe)

Silverblade, Stormchaser & Red Dog - I assume that means that all of you have more than 512 kb of RAM? ;)

And yes, an atmosphere can slow down the render time a lot...even a preview render can take
forever to do if the atmosphere is dense and is high quality.

Whenever I tweak my atmospheres I usually consider if the sky will be visible or not, because if
it isn't I usually take down the details in the clouds. Don't need high details in clouds you cannot
see. And if I'm still moving things around after I loaded the atmosphere and want to do test
renders, I turn down the quality of fog and haze (if it's set to a high) and I do the same with the
light.
When I'm done I can always turn those back up again before I start the final render.

C.

I always import Poser first, fix the materials on them, scale to taste, then work on lighting to capture what I am after, than start adding Vue elements. I usally save the atmosphere I like, then change to the default until I get all the props/elements where I want them, then put the atmosphere back in, and begin a slow painful process of test render-fix this, test render- move that, until I finally get the image I want. Takes forever to get a scene created, and doesn't always work- in these instances I come back to it later (a year) and I can usually work out what I didn't like about it.
I find as I do it this way that what I had in mind in Poser doesn't always work as I had hoped, but the result always works out better.

Quote croxie - "I rarely know in beforehand what I want to create."

That alone can trigger very different ways of starting an image. In my case, the image is ready in my mind before I even open Vue. I know exactly what I want, I just have to translate it to Vue. Occasionally, Vue shows me a better way and I follow its advices... :-)

In the post before I wrote about my process after I open Vue. But in fact, I start working in an image before sitting in front of Vue. I start planning the image in those moments before falling asleep, in bed at night. I plan the sequence of the main things to do and I plan on how I will do them. There are some images where I need to work in Photoshop in advance (to prepare country trails, for example), or in GeoControl (to prepare terrains), or in Zbrush (to prepare some shapes), or Poser, and all that sequence I plan ahead, including the details of how I will achieve this or that effect. My average image takes 4 or 5 hours to complete (spread over several days, because my "real life" is very demanding...).
 

Quote - Silverblade, Stormchaser & Red Dog - I assume that means that all of you have more than 512 kb of RAM? ;)

OMG! How can you do ANYTHING with Vue using only 512 MB of RAM (I think you meant MB, not kb - lol).

Memory is the cheapest upgrade you can do. Even my old system that only uses DDR memory it was only $100 to upgrade to 2GB of good quality memory. And it makes all the difference in the world in Vue's stability.

I used to get crashes all the time with Vue with just 1 GB. Especially when I upgraded to Vue 6.

Invest in an upgrade to at least 2GB on your system, you will be so much happier with Vue!

AboranTuristCouncil - yawp....Poser is more limited that way. Not a lot of room for any bigger visions at all.

Rutra - yes, it can affect a lot of things, but I usually know if I want to create a landscape or if I have a Poser figure in mind that I want to put into a render. Since I'm a traditional artist I often start with the background no matter if I know what I want to do or not...then everything is born from there.
However, if I need anything from Poser or any other software, I save my work in Vue and do what I need to elsewhere...then open Vue again and import the model/texture/terrain.
99% of my renders doesn't include models I don't already have in the library in Vue, so I try to stay out of Poser if I can :)

Red Dog - Duh! LOL....yeah....I DID mean MB, not kb...geez...hehe
And I will build a new graphic desk top for the studio in the end of May, which will be a lot bigger than the laptop I'm on today. So I won't spend any money on this lil laptop when it comes to RAM.
But today I'm running Vue 6 xStream with the astonishing amount of 512 Mb...that is correct :)
Makes for some interesting happenings...I can tell you that....hehe

C.

Quote - AboranTuristCouncil - yawp....Poser is more limited that way. Not a lot of room for any bigger visions at all.

I respectfully disagree. What Vue produces vastly outweighs what I originally created in Poser. An Example, and another. Both were originally conceived in Poser, but have been enhanced to varying degrees in Vue. The first one I knew what I wanted, but it took the better part of four years to finally achieve it, the second was not what I had set out to accomplish at all, but the results were more than satisfying.

Croxie,
512meg RAM? Eeeeek ! Never going back to a 32 bit OS, and less than 8 gig of RAM if I can ever help it ;)

Take 6 megs of actual, non-Vue polygons in the scene, and like it!! Boo yah! :thumbupboth:

<--- still plodding along on 1GB Ram.

I think Poser vs Vue is difficult to compare in the first place since they are two very different pieces of software. Poser is aimed on character development, while Vue was made for landscape and as the name implies, views of different kinds.

And being an old Brycer, Vue does more for me.

LOL @ Silverblade.
Trust me, I wish I had a 64-bit machine instead...coz this sucks to be polite about it :p
But, it might happen in the end of May ;)
With a computer like yours someone would probably have to bend me off the screen...hehehe

C.

Croxie,
ROFLMAO ;)

Old Brycer too, hence I Iove Vue :)

Hope you get something nice then! Despite all what folk say (including myself, once, ah the irony!), I find vista 64 Ultimate an awesome operating system, there are some niggly bits, like you have to get rid of the very annoying "User Account Control" (UAC) garbage, that will drive you nuts otherwise :p, and set it to run as Administrator.

But its seriously as big a change, as going from oh, an Amiga, to a Pentium 2 or 3 with WIndows 98. Maybe more so.

Quote -
Hope you get something nice then!

Oh yes. I've got my own personal hardware supplier and I will get it much cheaper as well.
Can't get better than that. And I know what I want :)

My partner is fiddling more with Poser than I am and I've noticed that his logical mind (he's a programmer) makes him put together scenes in a different way than I do. Not saying that I'm not logical....I have my moments too...but compared to him my mind works differently.
 
When starting out with Bryce in the mid 90's I think at least I set my ways of creating scenes. It hasn't changed a lot since then. Hopefully the quality has changed, but that's a different story :p

C.

I started with Bryce 2 myself, then wince I was working at a school, got a chance for an educational bundle that had Bryce 3, Poser 3, Ray Dream Studio 5, and Painter.

I started Vue with version 2, and just can't go back to the Bryce interface anymore. However, I do still use Bryce 5.5 from time to time to make landscapes that I export and use in Vue :)

I started in Bryce, then discovered Poser, and eventually discovered Vue 4 esprit. Accustomed (at the time) to the Bryce interface, I found Vue's interface to be intimidating at first, but when I created my first render, I knew there was no going back. I did obtain a copy of Bryce 6 a short while ago, mainly to see if I could import some old Bryce scenes into Vue via a conversion tool that works only a Mac. I was stunned I couldn't get Bryce to do anything I wanted it to do. It seemed too counter intuitive to what I knew from Vue.

BTW: The conversion utility didn't work, so I'll have to re-make the scenes anew.

Red Dog - I think I started out with Bryce 2, then Poser 2 and I didn't really discover Vue until Vue 4 came out. Back then I had huge problems with Vue since it kept crashing (some bug that they later fixed), but I was hooked :)

A lot of my old renders in my gallery here are made in Bryce. Characters imported from Poser to Bryce etc.
These days, because of the tiny lil laptop I'm using, it's a hassle to import anything from Poser. A bird here and there works, but when it comes to bigger characters it's a pain.

AboranTouristCouncil - you have the same line of discoveries of apps that I have then :)
You're on a Mac btw?
I used Mac a lot when I was working with advertisement...but that's a long time ago now.

C.