e-on offered a sidegrade for users of older Infinite versions, you could sidegrade to Vue 9 Complete for 99$.

Did anybody use that offer?

Yup!  Glad I did.

Are you able to load the old plants that came with the old Infinite version into the new Complete?

It doesn't work for me and e-on told me I should re-purchase the entire plant pack (200$) !!!

I haven't run into any problems yet, but I did go into my account purchases and reset whatever was locked to the new version and re-downloaded/installed them.  Everything else seems to be working fine.

Weird. Could you please check something for me?

I'm having trouble with these plants: all the Alder trees, the Tomato plant, the Betel Palm Seedling, the Aucuba plant and several others.

They were all part of Infinite 7.5 and aren't part of Complete 9 by default. But since I paid for them (Infinite wasn't cheap!) I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to use them in Complete too.

Could you please check one or two of those and see if they work for you?

Sigh, sorry.  I upgraded from 6 not 7 and I don't have those.  I do have a tomato plant that does work but not the others.

Oh I see. Thank you anyway. :)

Anybody else who could check that for me?

If other stuffs are more important than Complete 9, could you cancel your order to get them back?

I can always switch back to my old Infinite 7.5, but that is slow and buggy.

I really don't see why I should have to pay again for content I have already paid for once. Especially because they never mentioned these restrictions anywhere.

I'd cancel the order and get the Infinite version so you don't lose any functionality.

It's not about functionality. I don't need the additional features Infinite has over the Complete version.

All I want is to be able to USE THE CONTENT I HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR.

I don't want any new plants, so I don't see why I should be forced to pay again to get the same files which I already have. It's only a matter of registration, after all.

Could you imagine having to re-purchase all your Poser content after you switched to a different version?

Quote - I'm having trouble with these plants: all the Alder trees, the Tomato plant, the Betel Palm Seedling, the Aucuba plant and several others.

They were all part of Infinite 7.5 and aren't part of Complete 9 by default. But since I paid for them (Infinite wasn't cheap!) I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to use them in Complete too.

From your description, it seems that e-on define those plants belong to infinite version only. In your case, you must upgrade to infinte again to use those plants. Vue 9 complete is complete version only.

How about installing both version on same pc? You created files with those plants in 7.5 infinte, then re-opened and rendered them in 9 complete?

How about installing both version on same pc? You created files with those plants in 7.5 infinte, then re-opened and rendered them in 9 complete?

Doesn't work, unfortunately.

What irks me most is this:
When I bought the Infinite version some time ago, I nearly decided to get the smaller version and buy the plant pack extra. If I had done that, I could have the plants unlocked for Complete 9.
Since I opted for the Infinite 7.5 after all, I spent more money AND have to spend another bunch of money to get the plants which I would have had without additional cost if I had opted for the less expensive solution.

Does this seem fair?

Quote - Could you imagine having to re-purchase all your Poser content after you switched to a different version?

If I had the Pro version of Poser 12 and then "sidegraded" to a newer version 13 that was a lite version, I would not expect any of my Pro files to load into the lite program.  I would have to then buy a plugin or add-on to get the lite program to import my Pro stuff.

If you want to keep your Vue Complete, then keep your Infinite version installed so you can go back to it when Complete reaches its limit.  Part of having Vue Infinite is that it has a larger plant library.

Anyway, when an offer from E-on sounds too good to be true, it's never true.  Trust your instinct next time.  E-on is very ambiguous on its web site.  Their hope is that customers will buy things by making their products sound like it's a deal.  Other companies will add legalese at the bottom stating everything that can go wrong or will cost you extra or is totally unnecessary to buy.  E-on hopes you will guess on the side of buying.

If I had the Pro version of Poser 12 and then "sidegraded" to a newer version 13 that was a lite version, I would not expect any of my Pro files to load into the lite program.

But those plants aren't pro files per se. They don't need advanced functionality, they work perfectly well in the "smaller" versions. Just because they were part of a bundle now they're limited to that bundle - and there was never any hint at this limitation to be found anywhere.

Anyway, when an offer from E-on sounds too good to be true, it's never true.  Trust your instinct next time.  E-on is very ambiguous on its web site.

Sadly, this is true. Not the best way to get new customers and keep the existing ones.
If Carrara had a more logical UI I'd have ditched Vue long ago.

Also... I've bought plants from E-on, not knowing that they were already included in a product.  They changed the name of the plant and offered it on their store.  After I installed them, they showed up twice in Vue.  Same exact plants -- just different file names.  So now I have to look over every plant I have first before I add to them.

With Luxology, I know what I'm buying.  A new version of modo is released.  I buy it.  Simple.  A new training video, I buy it.  Done.

But with E-on... A new program is announced.  Every customer (new or old) is confused as to what was just announced exactly.  And what are the consequences of buying or not?

E-on sets their rules of upgrade. No one can change them.

I hope you could forget the problems of those plants soon, or they will affect your creativity in long term because you think about them all the time. :(

I pay $195 per year for the Infinite maintenance plan. Maybe I do not need the full functionality, but it is a good feeling to have the opportunity.

Mazak

e-on is a bunch of crooks.  Their bought plants become unuseable when upgraded in vue versions that are no longer unsupported.  Thats enough for me to call it quits forever and just stay with version 6 with the plants that work with that versions.  Soon render engines will exist that put vue to shame so the money for new vues is just wasted.  The future with 3d & holograms is here and coming soon.  The era of vue software is over for good.  This is the end of the end. A new beginning will begin...

Quote - The era of vue software is over for good.

However many blockbusters (eg. avatar) use Vue...

Yeah, and I wonder how they did it.

I tried to import V4 with some hair and Vue Inf. crashed. Can't handle high-res textures. That's why I wanted to upgrade, because I really can't work with that bug collection that is called Vue Infinite 7.5

Quote - > Quote - The era of vue software is over for good.

However many blockbusters (eg. avatar) use Vue...

for Matte paintings only, i.e. flat backgrounds. The actual 3D rainforest was populated with Massive and rendered out with Renderman, I heard.

http://avatarblog.typepad.com/avatar-blog/2010/05/find-out-what-software-was-used-in-avatar-the-movie.html

Vue is officially part of many a matte painter's toolkit - not as the finished render, but a starter cuz it cuts TONS of corners for them on deadlines. We're not just talking "Bob's FX House" - we're talking ILM, Digital Domain, etc.

Given how much those studios charge for high end sevices, Vue is an OMG bargain. Sure, to you and me (and hobbyists in general), it's expensive, but it's a steal for a medium to large studio.

Sadly, my copy of V6I is too old to upgrade/sidegrade. Just came from e-on's site - they only go back as far as V7I to qualify.

To make it worse, my copy at home stopped working around October/November-ish - which is why I haven't been active lately, or entered any contests. The one at my warehouse is working, but I'm not there when I have time for 3D play.

Guess I'll just have to save up and fork over the cost of V9I for what I do with it, even though I'm still not getting paid for it yet.

-Lew

Actually, Esha - Vue doesn't have a problem with Poser because of "high-res textures" at all. Poser and Vue are different programs made by different companies and Poser wasn't written to export to another program - Vue/E-On tried to write Vue to accomplish this without Smith Micro's help, really.

There's this bizarre heirarchy between finding the meshes (not just the figure - the clothing, hair, props like gloves, shoes, etc.), it's posed characteristics, then the textures - all through different Runtime Folders (huh..?) when all Vue wants is the mesh and the texture file - done!

You can load massive textures onto hi-polygon meshes (multiple meshes in the low millions each) in Vue with no problem whatsoever. I save stuff out from C4D or Max, do HEAVY detailing in Mudbox, then do texturing through BodyPaint and Photoshop (and we're talking multiple 2k and 4k textures for each section of each mesh kind of thing - no single little 2048x2048 for an entire mesh) with zero problems. None.

But when I try to import 2 Poser characters at once it chokes up. Despite the hype, they don't really talk to each other as well as E-On would hope. And since pro FX houses and arch-viz houses don't use Poser, not a big deal to their big-ticket clients where they get the most PR from.

I hope this helps in understanding the Vue/Poser disfunctional relationship - they got it workin'... But barely... And it ain't a happy household when it's done...

Good luck and happy rendering!

-Lew

Quote - To make it worse, my copy at home stopped working around October/November-ish

Why did it stop working?  Should the rest of us start panicking?

Probably my setup.

It's a Dell, running Win7 64-bit, when V6I was made during XP 32-bit years for PCs. I have a feeling it just doesn't like my computer and OS.

I'm sure I could re-install it, and it might work for a while, but might stop working again, so I just been waiting til I could afford to simply upgrade to 8 - now 9 - where it would likely run more easily on Win7.

Glad I skipped Vista. Lot of co-workers and assosiates cussing all day cuz stuff they used from XP wouldn't work (like Softimage XSI 4.2 - nope!).

-Lew

Quote - Actually, Esha - Vue doesn't have a problem with Poser because of "high-res textures" at all.

Well, in my case I think it does. It crashes even when I import a single hair figure that has one single body part, so it's not a case of dependencies. When I reduce the resolution of the textures everything is fine.

I just don't want to have to edit all the texture maps, backing up the originals and restoring them after having done my Vue render...

Vue certainly has a problem with huge texture maps in my experience. I often (more and more) use the Collada export (Poser 7), among other things it allows you to downscale the texture maps right away. Also it feels as if Vue "likes" the Collada better, oddly enough.
And downscaling the texture maps is very useful ideed, you don't want a 3000x3000 pixels set of textures for a bird to be used at a small size, or V4 on the half-distance :) It's a waste of ressources any way you look at it. You may be lazy or impatient, that'll backfire! Most problems people have with Vue comes from rushing things and not being careful IMHO.
(I know that you can downscale texture maps in Vue 9, but I don't have 9, and haven't read anything about it, good or bad.)

Esha - you didn't understand what I was saying. You gave me Poser related problem/solution descriptions. Take Poser out of the equation.

Either Vue doesn't like Poser as well as they hoped, or Poser doesn't like other apps, so resources go down the tubes - which is why when you lower the res of the Poser texture maps (and thereby freeing up RAM resources - get it?) it works "better".

Try bringing in a generic 3D mesh that has nothing to do with Poser. Bring it in with multiple massive texture maps and you'll find zero problems with your scene, animation, moving the viewports, rendering, etc. Download something from scifi3d, Evermotion, Dosch or 3DTotal, or one of the things on the 3D World discs - NOT Poser related things they periodically have on the disc, but cars, tanks, furniture, etc.

The problem isn't texture maps, but Poser and its convoluted file saving and reading system that is a beast all its own. Load any regular mesh and it's textures, no problem.

Good luck-

-Lew

I don't want to download something from wherever, I want to use a certain hair with a certain figure. I supposed that a program in the price category of Vue Infinite which advertises that it can import Poser scenes would read those files correctly.

And I really don't see what is so convoluted about a clear path pointing to a specific object and a specific texture... ;)

Besides, I've also had crashes without any Poser objects in the scene. And it was not a memory issue, it crashed despite having enough free resources. And e-on never fixed those issues, all they did was releasing new versions we customers have to pay for - without knowing if those bugs would be fixed or not.

Quote - ... Try bringing in a generic 3D mesh that has nothing to do with Poser. Bring it in with multiple massive texture maps and you'll find zero problems with your scene, animation, moving the viewports, rendering, etc. Download something from scifi3d, Evermotion, Dosch or 3DTotal, or one of the things on the 3D World discs - NOT Poser related things they periodically have on the disc, but cars, tanks, furniture, etc.

The problem isn't texture maps, but Poser and its convoluted file saving and reading system that is a beast all its own. Load any regular mesh and it's textures, no problem.

Don't agree fully. I've had DAZ Studio collada and Sketchup import making Vue crash, the culprit being many and/or huge texture maps. But it's true that it becomes even more fragile when it comes to Poser imports.

It's not as simple as a clear path to the object, and a clear path to the texture.

There's the object, which is an unwelded dense mesh (which is problematic by itself) from one folder, with posed characteristics of numeric values in another folder, multiple props like clothing and hair from other folders - shaped to fit said unwelded character - which the coordinates and displacement values are in yet more folders... And on and on and on.

Then it's brought into Vue with the thought that it's a simple model with a clear path - why are there problems?

E-On has a long history of PO'd Poser customers.

Not so many PO'd customers who use 3D packages like Max, Maya, C4D, XSI, Wings3D, Blender, Lightwave, etc.

Just Poser... So...

Bring in a dense model that has zero to do with Poser in any way, and see how well it functions... Just a test.

-Lew

Quote - e-on is a bunch of crooks.  Their bought plants become unuseable when upgraded in vue versions that are no longer unsupported.  Thats enough for me to call it quits forever and just stay with version 6 with the plants that work with that versions.  Soon render engines will exist that put vue to shame so the money for new vues is just wasted.  The future with 3d & holograms is here and coming soon.  The era of vue software is over for good.  This is the end of the end. A new beginning will begin...

Thought you called it quits nearly 3 years ago? or have you been lying, and secretly using Vue ever since, hm? :P

and on the Poser issue

yeah, the problems largely it seems, the Poser SDK, which lets Poser "talk to" other apps or rather, to be exact,  lets folk write stuff to interact with poser
hence Vue9 has ability to chose which SDK to use, as each Poser patch changes the SDK to some extent.

Bigbraader - Sketchup, too? A simple OBJ export imports perfectly into Vue, which leads me to ask the question - are you using OBJ or Collada (which has bones, rigging, physics, weighting, gravity, surface and material properties, etc., as data placement even if it's not there that will confuse Vue, taking resources as it tries to even figure out what it's looking at)?

After .VOB, Vue's very favorite format is the simply uncomplicated OBJ.

Esha - now I'm wondering what your system is if you've had this with OBJs not related to Poser? A little older and not once top of the line processor (say, original P4, but medium speed at the time), and maybe 1GB of RAM with a 256MB graphics card type of situation?

I DO forget periodically that I reasonably trick-out my machine between good processors, as much RAM as I can afford, massive power supply (900-1,000ws), around 90% towards the top current (at the time) gaming cards, etc. While I don't spend $10k, I do hit around $2,500.

I've loaded multiple 8k and 12k textures without a hitch, but I DO keep a higher end system for this.

-Lew

Quote - Esha - now I'm wondering what your system is if you've had this with OBJs not related to Poser?

It was a Dual Core, 2GB RAM, Win XP Professional. And I had no obj file at all, only a terrain with a painted-on ecosystem, but not very dense.

Now I have a Quad, 6GB RAM and Win 7 64bit, and I'm really hoping that will help.