heyas; this is a list of the bugs/problems occuring in vue 4, and a note on what has/hasn't been reported to e-on yet. just so we dont all swamp them with the same stuff. :) --- Volumetric Spotlights Black Spot. when the camera is inside the spotlight's cone, a black circle appears in the render. --- Material Editor Drag & Drop. you can't drag a material up from the mixed materials into the main material to 'un-mix' them. you can't drag the main material to a storage slot. --- GIF 89a Interlaced. this format can't be read by vue, only 89a non-interlaced. (if you get an error reading your gifs, this is it.) (i thought there was another one, but i cant remember, now.) all these have been reported to e-on.

here's a non-reported, not very important, completely insignificant bug: --- Alpha/Z-Depth Channel File Names. the default tag for the alpha channel render is _z and for the z buffer is _a. :)

In Vue 4 have they fixed the problem with exporting terrains along with an approximated image file of the materials it contains? Vue 3.1 will crash alot when trying to export both. And how about the material summary box? Does the latest edited material still try to appear close to the front, when actually it's elsewhere in the lineup?

--- Material Summary drag & drop When you're in the material summary, select one material and drag it over to replace another material, it does apply the dragged material to the corresponding object(s0, but it doesn't "bump" the two material together like it should. In other words, if you drag material A onto Material B (thus cancelling out B), B changes into A but remains displayed even though A is already displayed. If you have 5 materials in the summary, replace one, it will still be counting 5 materials even though there are only 4 after replacing. I'll add more to this list later. :)

bloodsong, --- Volumetric Spotlights Black Spot. when the camera is inside the spotlight's cone, a black circle appears in the render. hm, I just tried it, it doesn't do that in my beta. But it seems to me that this is maybe not a bug. If you put a normal cam (in real life) in a spotlights cone, you would get about the same effect. --- GIF 89a Interlaced. this format can't be read by vue, only 89a non-interlaced. (if you get an error reading your gifs, this is it.) Whatfor would you need to use an interlaced Gif in Vue ? I have no idea. :-)Guitta

heyas; i need gif 89a interlaced, because most of my gifs use that format. its annoying to have to change them to non-interlaced. and the spotlight spot is not normal. if i look into a volumetric light, i should see the light cone, not a big black circle. of course, it could be, possibly, my video card messing things up. has anybody else tested the black spot theory?

can anybody confirm these things? am i the only one with all these bugs??! :) --- Material #2 Altitude. if you mix materials by altitude, and change material 2 to use high altitude instead of low altitude, vue changes it back to low altitude every time you edit something else in the material.

I wish I could help, but I'm too much of a goof. :) No, err... I have to hand it to you bloodsong, when you get a new piece of software you really go all out and learn it, don't you? Now for what you said about the altitude thingie: PLEASE don't tell me that!!! How about rendering? Will it only mess it up when you try to edit it, or as soon as you close the window? I LOVE Vue's altitude-dependant materials. I'd hate to think that somehow they broke it. :(

Hi bloodsong, There is also a case where the textures will revert to world orientation instead of object orientation when you edit mixed materials. It happens mostly when you copy/paste a material. :( Cheers!

heyas; calm down, mike. :) it switches to low altitude when you do something like.... edit one material or other, or edit the function or the filter, or change the blending percent or mode. you can see right away in the preview. you just go back to the altitude tab and change it back to high altitude. then say okay, and it'll be fine. or, you can just swap the materials, i expect. but not in all cases. i havent been paying attention to the world/object orientation part. will have to look at that, too.

the low/high and world/object things are quite annoying...I know how to resolve them but they shouldn't work that way. :) Cheers!

Y'know, I should have mentioned this by now, but I haven't, because I thought maybe I was imagining it somehow: I have several alt.-dep. materials I've made which are very similar to each other and are made to be applied to separate terrains which increase in height,through distance, though joined. Often I have to re-apply the material I want to each newly created terrain, because the new ones want to take over the characteristics of the lower altitude, previous ones, which results in Vue "forgetting" the altitude settings on the one which came first. Usually I can correct it by re-applying the saved material, but sometimes I have to change materials and THEN re-apply. Oh well, if what you're talking about is similar, I'll be OK, since I already have learned some of the stupidity strangeness inherant in the material editor. Like Bill says, "Vue funny sometime." ;)

Oh I noticed this "thingy" the first day I got Vue 3 and it is still present in Vue 4. What annoys me most is the fact that Vue 4 still dissapears like Vue 3 did for no reason once a while...good thing I save often because it's quite frustrating to see your application go away while you are really tweaking something hehe. It's funny to see these bugs still present in Vue 4 and I made sure I deleted Vue 3 instead of upgrading the version so this is a brand new install without any traces of Vue 3. :( Let's hope they finally get fixed sometime soon...and it's a bummer we can't export the vegetation to LW. Cheers!

I suspect you could export alphas and all that neat stuff I have no idea about and get Vue veggies into LW as images mapped to planes? You know, with transparencies and all that happy stuff. Of course, I know nothing about LW, or how or even if it can do such a thing. Yeah, Vue's a little weird sometimes, but all is usually well if you save often. I still love it anyway. :)

Yeah but Z-Buffers and Alphas wont give me true 3D trees. :( This is good for distant forests or terrains but not for close shots. Cheers!

Have you considered X Frog? In any event, vue's trees aren't really meshes. Just apply a solid color to it and see. All they are is a series of curved shapes with trans maps applied, and Solid Growth makes that a little different each time, sometimes drastically different.

Heard of it but never checked it out. I know some LW plugins can create foliage and I know how to make animated grass and fields but it would have been nice to export vegetation from Vue to LW. I think that WCS and AWB allows such export. Cheers!

hey! you guys get offa my bug list with yer lightwave stuff! ::boot!:: :) (anyway, e-on makes a plug-in for lightwave. but i think its only skies? did you look at it?) go a reply from steve at e-on. he says the black circle bit in the volumetric spotlights will be addressed in vue 4.01. however, the material editor glitches.... he said he'd point them out, but not to hold my breath for any fixes. ditto with the gif89a interlaced file reading. :/ the following bugs (listed above) have now been reported to e-on: material summary drag & drop material #2 altitude world/object space switch object space on boolean union a/z image names

What?!?!? I didn't think Light Wave had any such bugs, but it's cool to know that if Vue has those same bugs in common with LightWave, well, at least we're in good company. ;) .......... But seriously, folks...... Y'know, today I was working on a pic in Vue 3, and I loaded this fairly complex material I had made, which was a combination of image files and procedurals. It was a stone wall sort of material, which was mostly .bmp, but it had moss growing sparsely on top, which was procedural. I loaded it and after a few test previews I realized all was not well in Vueland Sure enough, all my secondary mat's were no longer Object Space..... Thanks for your persistence bloodsong, as well as your updates to the ever-growing Vue knowledge base. :)

The LW export is not a bug at all, it's just a bummer issue :) As for Ozone I really don't need it as we can composite Vue scenes in LW even from still images. The ideal situation would be Vue scenes in LW and use HyperVoxels to add realism to the scenes if they are animated. Glad to see there is a list of bugs forwarded to e-on. :) Cheers!

Oh I just found a huge one. Boolean stuff doesn't work period on imported objects. I tried it in three with the exact same meshes that I imported into it and it worked perfect. I did a render of each and sent it in. I'm sure I'm not the first. But that is a huge huge bug. That's cuts the usefullness of Vue 4 to less than 1/4 in my opinion. That bites !

Hmmm... I had never noticed that before, but after doing a few tests with some simple geometrical shapes, you're right. I was able to do it just as expected in Vue 3, but in Vue 4, all the imported meshes involved simply vanished. It seems to work fine with the Vue primitives though. I wonder what's up with that?

Ya that bites. I found out even more, meshes I made in Vue 3 that use Boolean imported to Vue 4 no longer work ;( that realy bits. I got a couple of gigs of work done here in Vue 3 format. I tried even different formats 3ds and cobs same thing works in 3 dies in 4. Only the objects that are in 4 work. Even the rocks work proper but imported stuff dies... That realy sucks if you just paid lotsa cash for a mesh now don't it? I got the patched version of Vue. I wonder if that was also in the original buggy 4.0. I'm running 4.02 right now.

That's gotta be something new since the patch. The Vue libraries themselves come with many boolean-ed objects (some of which I made, so I know!) and they've been working. (I don't have the 4.03 beta installed.) Thanks for reporting the bug to E-on, Pete! :)

Varian are you saying that some of those boolean objects on the Vue 4 CD are your creations made from regular polygon meshes which you gave to E-on? Which ones?

Yep, there are ten of 'em in all. Kind of disappointed because they removed my name from the notes on each of 'em; don't know why they did that. But if you're familiar with the VOB objects I've got on my website, you should be able to recognize most of 'em. :)