It was long, it was hard, but I finally did it !!! Since I got my hand on Vue 3.0, I wanted to make a character under a little "rain of stars". My first trys were not really satisfying, but when I got the Vu4 demo to say me 'Bienvenue !' (I know, I insist on this...) I knew I can make it. So, after one day of searching here's the result. It's made with 275 little point light with flares. The image, in 640x480, in Final Mode took 11h10 to render ! I'm happy and can now go sleep quiet... ;-) PS : it's strange that, as you can see, the character loose, in certain part, the smoothness informations and have polygons clearly visible...

"the character loose, in certain part" ---- Not sure if the "Edit Object" under "Object" menu "smooth mesh" in Vue 4 can help....or may be, this feature is not included in the demo version....check it out.

The little rain of stars is very pretty. I'm glad you were succesful. It's a shame about the mesh implosions. Was it a poser character imported as an object or a pz3?

I love those stars, you should write a quick tutorial on how you made them. Very nice. Sharen

Very cool image Bop! Did you have the point lights with shadows turned on or off? I don't even know if the Vue 4 demo can turn the shadows on or off, but if so, you could probably get away with a much lower render time if you turned all the stars' shadows off and used just two or three normal lights for casting shadows. It's the calculations Vue has to do for shadows that will increase render time, along with anything volumetric or transparent. Sharen, you can get stars like that in the volumetric light editing box by selecting Random Streaks, and playing around with the Intensity, Amount and Sharpness controls. Also, the rotate slider is pretty cool. :)

beautiful Bop 8 ) very nicely done. don't know what to tell ye about the mesh messing up like that... so far the meshes I"ve imported came out all right. but even with that the render's lovely.. Ooh.. Thanks for the tip Mike 8 ) on both the shadowes and the volumetric light trick 8 ) CHeers

Very lovely and creative work, Claude! The little stars look great. :) P.S. Please remember when posting an image like this, to mark the setting on the post for "Nudity".

Wow thanx everybody ! The character is exported as a 3DStudio object (3ds). I forgot to say that, with a lower number of lights, there's no problem of softness. Lights are not volumetric, the star effect is from the 'lens flare' editing box, and it's effectively a playing around with Intensity, Amount and Sharpness. For the shadow option, half of the lights have no shadow. OK, sharen, I will write a quick tutorial on this. (In english, it will be a challenge for me, but I can do it !!! :-D) You're right, Varian, I forgot to check it... this will never occur anymore ! :-) PS : I can say that, as it is said on e-on site, the Vue4 demo is fully functionnal. Only the save option and rendering at higher resolution than 640x480 are disabled. I can't wait to have bucks for purchasing Vue4...

I can't wait until you've got it either, since you can produce cool stuff like this only with the demo! :)

Cool concept! If all else fails, I'd try exporting under another file format and see if the same thing happens with the mesh. Rich

um.... looks like 'nudity' tag is on it, to me. yes, this is pretty cool. you should have tried the pz3 import, the figure might've turned out better. :)

Yeah, Varian had Russell fix the nudity tag thingie. And I guess I meant to say the Lens Flare editor, not the Volumetric Light editor. Stupid typing fingers!

Bop, you might want to try this to smooth out your model. Select the model and double click on the wireframe. In the window that pops up, set the angle value to 90 degrees and press Enter. Vue should smooth out those pesky polygons :)