This looks great!!! Uh, dumb newbie question... How are you doing this? SunDogDeb

Cool, Steve! Now, what would Kinkaid have done? Contrast, right? Lotsa colors, and lotsa light, but, contrast, contrast, contrast... beautiful panzies too. :)

Ok, so the question is, first, are you using flowers from Vue? Second, are you taking one individual flower, multiplying them, grouping them, and then moving them here and there?? This info is definitely appreciated... :)

They do look like pansies, Steve! I can imagine tons of uses for this technique...er, you will share this technique, right? :)

Reminds me of the flower clocks that that used to be common at English seaside resorts. Can the technique be adapted for leaves? It would make great ground cover for an autumnal scene.

...there's both more AND less going on here than meets the eye. There are no actual flower models. What you see is a bit of smoke and mirrors created with a couple of terrains, and a nifty bit of textures I created in Photopaint. 1. I went out into the yard and grabbed a few pansy blossoms. 2. I Scanned them into the computer. 3. I Created several different colored Photopaint Image Sprayers. 4. Using a layered technique in Photopaint I painted hundreds of pansy blossoms in both color and alpha map form. 5. In Vue4, I created a terrain and spent a lot of time molding it, (it's the toughest part) and applied a foliage type material to it. 6. I duplicated the terrain and raised it slightly above the 1st terrain. 7. On the 2nd terrain, I created a material using the pansy color map and the pansy alpha map. (for the transparency) 8. Last, but very important, I took the 2nd terrain back into the terrain editor and added pebbles to the surface. This keeps the flowers from looking too flat. There you have it. Simple, no? -SMT

Ummm...okay, I almost got it. It's basically the same method at the "distant forest" but using an image map for the flower portions, yes? Is all the green "grass" we can see in this image part of terrain #1, or just some of it? It really does look very cool, and I like Mark's idea about applying it for autumn images, too. :)

You've got the hang of it. It is similar to the "Distant forest. The grass in the background is simply the default grass material applied to the infinite ground plane. I used a more primitive version of this (mapping on a ground plane) when I wanted cherry blossoms covering the ground below a cherry tree. you should be able to use it for any kind of semi-flat ground cover. -SMT

Simple, yet so innovative. Thanks for sharing it! :)

Very clever... I'm glad I have photopaint.. :) and what is "distant forest"?? Is this like an aftershave?? :)

How very aromatic! :D In the Vue 3 manual (English), check page 204. If you can't find your manual, take a look in the objects browser under the Samples category, and you'll find a "Distant Forest" sample terrain already built. In the manual, it explains how to build it, which is similar to how Steve built his pansies. :)

P.S. The "Distant Forest" sample and tutorial also come with version 2. :)

Very interesting Steve. I had been thinking they didn't look like actual models, but really couldn't tell what you'd done.

I see... I found the tutorials on different subjects in Vue 2, but they don't seem to have tutorials in the program correlating to the scenes that they have for tutorial purposes... I'll check out distant forest image...