So my copy of Vue 4 arrived today on a Hybrid Win/Mac CD - impressive! I played with the demo on a Duron 700 system but I got this copy I got to set it up on my iBook. Initially it seemed a fair bit slower for the OpenGL previews. But as it turns out, the background thread GL stuff works on the ATI Rage chipset where as I had to disable it on the nVidia GeForce MX in my PC. It kind of weirded me out to have a low quality version appear followed by a high quality one later - and seemed to make things less responsive (the background thread is sucking up CPU to draw a detailed version while I'm onto the next thing). So I turned that off and it seems better now. However, there are some problems in this version (4.04) - which I guess is what I get for being an early adopter. Several keys aren't working as advertised. Nudge does not work at all. I was having a problem where Command/Option/etc.-click-dragging the main view would just make a selection rectangle instead of moving the camera around. Now with the background thread off (I think that's the only difference) Ctrl-dragging seems to work but the other keys make the main view blank (pure white) and still don't seem to work. I have yet to hook up my mouse which may be a suitable work around for some of the above (since I can just use the right mouse button instead of Command-clicking). The interface has the Aqua look, but it is somewhat non-standard from an Apple UI guidelines point of view. The Application menu doesn't have the standard About and Preferences options, which are under File/Options and Help/About instead. The file/save dialog has no easy way to jump to the user's home folder and I had some trouble where after creating a folder it was showing the contents of the wrong folder when clicking it. Also, the *.vue files you save have no association by extension or creator ID, so double clicking them pops up a choose application dialog. After going through this process, Vue didn't parse out the command line arguments and open the file. Overall it's still Vue4 and works mostly like the PC version, but it still needs some more work. Obviously a tad rushed to release it during MacWorld - which is not the end of the world so long as a patch is released in the near future. Attached: Kickstart graphic rendered in 3 minutes and 41 seconds on a G3 500 iBook.

Well, at least you managed to create the first official Vue/Mac picture I've ever seen. ;) In all honesty, I have no idea what to suggest, other than write to E-on about the problems. The only Mac experience I've ever had was while checking one out at Comp USA, and that was with some game on it, and not anything else. The salesman seemed to think I wanted to play games, after telling him I was interested in graphics. ;) I imagine you hit it right though, with your comment about wanting to get it out in time for MacWorld. Makes sense, really, though I don't necessarily agree with the idea. Nevertheless, E-on's probably got alot riding on this, so I'm sure you can expect bug fixes/patches fairly soon. I certainly hope so, becayuse I'm not looking forward to the idea of having Mac people wanting answers here. ;) Anyhow, I wish I could have something more insightful to say, but the Mac OS is completely alien to me. But again, thanks for mentioning this. Every bit of info that comes in here about mac and Vue 4 will be a help in the future, and thanks for the picture, too. And be saure to write to E-on about your problems. I am most certain that they don't want their Mac version to be as "funny" as their PC versions have been. ;) And I'm sure a patch will be available soon.

I wrote to E-on's support address with my list of bugs already. From reading through the forums, wasn't the 4.0 PC release about this buggy too? But now it's been patched up to 4.03 (and actually 4.04 on my CD though I don't know what the changes are). Unfortunately the lack of nudge and some other controls, not to mention the views not redrawing when panned - makes it pretty much unusable on the Mac right now. My last ditch attempt was to run with OpenGL off, which had more redraw problems and caused my first Vue Mac crash! I'm sure they are working on an update already. I hope so :) - n8

well, i've just received a new Vue 4 CD for Mac OS X (the first CD i had was damaged, and unreadable), and after installing i can say that this version is really buggy. The application quits in editing materials, sky, clouds, point of view... The Apple Guidelines are not implemented (Cmd-D to go to the desktop don't work as other keyboards shortcuts - Non standard interface), and the mac PZ3 files can not be imported. I will try disabling OpenGL. The only good point i've seen is the astounding fastness of the rendering. I was a bryce fan. I was. But Bryce is definetely too slow... :)

Yeah, the initial release of Vue 4.0 definitely has it's bugs. The patches since then ahve cleared most of those bugs up, except for a nagging, difficult couple. What makes it even worse is that we all have different bugs! Literally, some people have no problems with some things, while others do. In those cases, I'm betting it's an OS thing. I'm so sorry to hear about your troubles with Vue on the Mac. :( But I am sure that E-on will be working on patches ASAP. In the CG graphics industry, I know the Mac users love their machines, and it won't do any good for any company to ignore a buggy software!

I'm not surprised about the PZ3 support - the Windows version uses Poser itself to import the files - could be "interesting" for an OS X app to talk to an OS 9 app in this way. I just wish they let people know beforehand - they make it sound like the two versions have the same feature set. As for running without GL - it's worse. I took some screen shots with Grab so send to E-on - about to do that now. The rendering part works okay so far - and it's fairly fast. That's the only good thing. - n8

So y'all are saying the Poser import doesn't work either? Not at all? I'm sorry for bugging you, but I have a bad feeling that these very asame issues will be brought up over and over again, as more people buy the Mac version and wander on over here. Y'know, this has really got me pissed off. >;[

Congratulations, Nate, on posting the first Macintosh Vue image -- in this forum, at least. :) I'm not real surprised the Mac Vue isn't following Mac convention exactly. There are similar deviations on the PC side. Vue kind of likes to make its own conventions on some aspects. For the bugs, contacting E-on is the best move. Give 'em a chance to try to recreate the errors and work out what the problems might be, and it's almost guaranteed there'll be a patch along soonishly. E-on's support is quite responsive. :)

I have been sending email to E-on support, but no reply so far - I expect that won't come until after the weekend. The Mac conventions are not a huge deal, though it shouldn't be too hard to add Preferences to the Application menu in addition or instead of File/Options. So far, I'm finding that running in OpenGL with hardware acceleration and the background drawing thread on is the best way to go. May need to turn down the quality settings, as I sometimes get a wait cursor while the background thread redraws things. However, running without OpenGL gets all messed up and sometimes crashing - I sent screen shots to E-on to show what happens. Running without the background draw thread makes the view go white when you click+drag to make a selection. One definite differences between 4.04 PC/Mac and the 4.03 PC demo is that when you change between these options you actually get a Save prompt before exiting. --- The main issues are with the keyboard controls. While the quick-reference card shows Command-click as an alternative to the right mouse button, the help and the program actually use Ctrl-click. It seems that E-on may have had some trouble using Command/Apple, which never does anything in Vue4. While Ctrl-click is often used on Mac for pop-up menus (in addition to Command-click and click-hold), Command-click is the usual alternative to the RMB. You might think that using a real mouse would fix these problems - but it goes deeper. Since a lot of functions use Ctrl, various things don't work. For example Ctrl+RMB modifies the Camera Focal. On Mac Ctrl+LMB does the same. But RMB itself Rotate's the camera - which should be Command+LMB but is actually Ctrl+LMB. Now we have two functions on one key combo - obviously only one works! In some cases there are work arounds - like Space+LMB rotates the camera as well, and there are the camera controls that can be used with the mouse. Somethings though - like nudge doesn't work at all - I assume they also had trouble trapping those arrow keys on Mac. I'm sure they are aware of these issues - and hope they don't decide that what they came up with in the end is really "good enough" but are instead working on a patch that will make the keys work as they should. I haven't gotten nearly as far into the program as "rx" - nor do I own Poser 4. Hopefully this thread will provide some work arounds for other Mac users until E-on gets us a patch. - n8

I have just found that Ctrl+Command+click works for zooming in and out, even though Command+click doesn't work as advertised for much of anything else. I find the combined Mac/Win keyboard controls very confusing - esp. in cases where Ctrl-something is specified, when E-on has used Ctrl-click to be equivalent to the RMB. Through experimentation, I may write up a Mac-specific Quick reference for the keys that work. If I go through all that, I'll be sure to post it up here as a PDF. - n8

Attached Link: http://www.nathany.com/vue4mac_quick_reference.pdf

I went through most of the keys on the quick reference (except animation). The linked PDF indicates keys that are different than E-on's help/quick reference card states, as well as which ones just don't work. I have sent this PDF to E-on along with more details (such as what a key does instead of what it should), plus another bunch of buglets I came across while doing this. Hope this is useful to someone - and I'd be interested to know if the problems are consistent across different Macs. - n8

Do the options work from the menu's? I never use the keyboard-commands in VUE on the PC version, so for all I know those may be messed up too. Only keyboard commands I'm familiar with are ctrl-a ctrl-c ctrl-v, but I know that on a PC keyboard-commands are screwed up when using a keyboard in another language, even changing the language settings in Windows can't fix that.

Yes - there is still a way to do pretty much everything if you use the mouse - which is how most Mac users are anyway, and I'm certainly not a Vue power user at this point. The main one is that nudge doesn't work. However, even in this case you can tweak the x,y,z in the numerics tab. It's just a pain! The other thing is that nearly all key combos that involve the mouse aren't documented properly in the quick reference card, manual and online help. This is because they intended to use Command-click to be equivalent to a right mouse button. But instead they used Ctrl-click - which reversed a bunch of commands around. The help does say Ctrl-click, but they didn't address the command reversal (for commands that utilized Ctrl already). They use the same help for PC/Mac - so the best thing they can do is split the Key reference into two separate pages. After figuring it out though, it's not too bad. There are some I couldn't get to work though. As an example, Ctrl+click an object within a group is supposed to select that object. This doesn't work, nor does Command-click. So instead you have to expand the group in World Browser and select the object that way. So there are some problems, but now that I've spent some time figuring things out - my previous comment on it being unusable was unwarranted. It's just not quite as "usable" as it should be. :-) - n8

After using Vue4 Mac for a while, I can assure you that it has much bigger problems than the nudge keys not working. Besides redraw problems where things don't appear in the material editor and such, I've managed to crash it several more times. At one point I had to reinstall the app just to get it to launch properly. I had done a save & quit, which seemed to save but not quit. I pushed the red "x", but apparently it was still doing something because it crashed and left that file messed up - along with everything else. My most recent crash left me without the scene file I was working on (unless I'm just really confused and didn't save this time around, but I thought I had). Fun, :( - n8

sigh Well, we all hoped for better initial news, but your documentation, Nate, is a very helpful thing -- for the Mac users out here and also for E-on, I'm sure. Try to be patient as it will take them some time to work through things, but I do have faith in E-on that they will be working it out. So hang in there and keep us updated! :)

Just got a message from Steve Bell - there will be a 4.05 patch that will address many of the issues, including "nudge" support. It is coming soon, maybe even this week! :-)

Excellent! :D