I have a question for you gurus.  Do you think there is a way to render an object, say a primative sphere, and have only the geometry rendered and not the skin of it?  I realize it is only a mathmatical object and it has no physical skeletal construction, but I know C4d can do it so I was wondering if VUE has that capability.  As powerful as the editor is, there has got to be a way.

If anyone could figure it out please post it so we can all learn from it.

I sure don't understand whant you mean, here. You want to render the obejct without the "skin"? What would the skin be?

Just the geometry.  Essentially force VUE to make a wireframe render.

Oh, I see, a wireframe render. Guess it isn't possible in Vue, but maybe with some postwork, a screen capture and a real render composited...

I presume that Vue primitives are not even meshes, but mathematical objects (otherwise I would not know how they would handle blobs) so the "wireframe" is not even defined. It is exactly the same situation as in POV-Ray: all entities but for mesh{and friends are mathematical items and if you go to povray.org you wil see that from time to time people pop up asking for a POV to mesh convertion and the answer is a more or less polite "forget it"...

Bye!!!

B.T.W. it would be EXTREMELY interesting to find a way to render only the wireframe of and imported mesh (e.g. modeled in Hex :biggrin:)

Well, Vue primitives are of course parametric objects, defined by a math function, not real geometry, but you can always bake to polygons.

If the object is uvmapped, you could always texture the object with the uvmap (not coloured, just  the raw uvmap template) and render that.  As long as you're uvmap doesn't have overlapping parts of mesh/polys, it should give you pretty much what you want. I've used this technique in bryce a while back (years ago) and it worked ok.

And, thinking a bit more about this,  if you invert the uvmap template and use that as the transparency map, then you can have only the edges of the polygons that make up the geometry show up - true wireframe (as opposed to the solid wireframe that my post above would give you). You might need a pretty big uvmap template texture thingy  to do this with to get sharp edge lines, but then doesn't Vue have some sort of texture caching to allow it to work with really huge texture maps (seem to remember them talking about this in some of the v6i advertising).

edit - forgot that Vue does trans maps reversed to bryce - you may not need to invert it to get the wireframe look.

Thanks flak.  Your method does work, but it isn't exactly what I wanted.  Either way, I will be playing around with it some more and I will be using a UV map.

Thx for all your help.

 Hi Gary,

I've played around a bit with this back when I was creating GridModeler. Here's an image from back then. It's a simple transparent map applied to a metablob using parametric and faces mode. It's far from perfect, but I think it's as close as you can get in Vue.