Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=67632&Start=1&Artist=agiel&ByArtist=Yes

I ran into an interesting problem when I was working on a new scene last night (see link). For some reason, the rendering in 'final' would stop between 50% and 75% of completetion, regardless of the resolution of the picture. I tried playing with the memory settings of windows, removed any unnecessary service on the system, limited the number of transparent materials... nothing worked. It was not a matter of file size (the scene is 32M and I did not have any problem with previous scenes or the same size). It was not a problem of complexity (only 3 million polygons). The problem was : too many lights :) 10 point lights plus the sun light is too much for a PIII 800 with 256 M of RAM. I limited the lights to 7 and got the pictures rendered fine. So... if your Vue freezes unexpectedly during rendering, check out your lights.

Hey thanks for the tip, agiel, I'll remember that, especially since the light will probably be the first thing I experiment with. My Vue 4 will be here today, and I know that because I've been following it's progress across the country on Fed Ex' website. :) And I might as well mention, that's a vey good idea for that picture you linked to, very interesting in the text. And the lighting in it is great, even if it WAS a problem.

Ever since I read a book about texturing and lighting in computer graphics, I try to use lights a lot to compensate for the lack of radiosity or area lights (a great reference book to read by the way). For example, the light on the right side of the old woman's face is a point light placed right next to the face. As well as the light around the young woman's face and belly. I have been amazed to see how much difference just a few additional light can make in a picture. Tonight I will try to make a render without additional light and post it here to show the difference.

Which book is that, the recent one on 3D lighting??

Attached Link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1562059548/qid%3D994961189/102-3888682-2789730

Here... I made a quick collage of different levels of lighting. The first image is the default render without any additional light (only sunlight). Of course, it is very dark because they are in a cave and because of the contrast induced by the volumetric atmosphere. The middle image only has 3 lights (one close to the face of the young and mature characters, the 3rd above her stomach). The 3rd picture has 7 lights - additional lights were places next to the face of the old woman, behind and in front of the dress of the mature woman and at the knees of the young one. You can compare the improvement. I also added a link to a reference to the book I was talking about.

I forgot : The light I used were point lights, no shadow, no lens flare, with a very small radius (15 to 35 on the slider).

Wow Laurent! First, your image in the gallery is quite wonderful. Second, thank you for sharing here the lighting samples and the book info. You've made both Vicky and Vue4 look real good, and I'm going to have to read that book. :)

Yes, thanks for the info...

Thanks varian I had to fight about 4 hours before I finally came to the Vue forum and searched for messages about crashes. One of them was about the number of lights and that was my solution. I did not mention the multiple crashes due to the imports from Poser. The old woman's dress was so twisted by her sitting position that it caused the import into vue to fail. I had to smooth things a little before I got it right. And there was also the usual bump maps to correct manually :) But overall, it was a fun picture to make.

Interesting to se the development of this, and thanks for the book link. :)

It looks awesome agiel. This lighting problem is in vue 4? Reason I ask is that I did an image in vue 3.1 that had 15 lights and the moon, and it rendered without too much worry. It took 8hrs to render on a PIII 600 coppermine with 384mb ram. When I first started the scene..it refused to go through the preview render..this took anything from 1hr to 1.45hrs in preview mode. I fixed it by defragging my hard drive and then did my preview render, and then the final render went through on personal high settings without a problem. You could try checking to see the amount of fragmentation your drive has. I hope this helps a little..I know it isn't directly related to vue 4, but it might be worth a shot. Good luck :)