New Vue Mac user here. Old Brycer. You guys have a great forum here.

Any other Mac or PC users have this problem?

I installed the 4.05 update last night.
Although the nudge keys now work I have lost the sun in my volumetric skies. The sun object simply does not glow at all. Still works fine in standard atmosphere skies.

I rebooted OS X to see if that would change anything, but it didn't.

As soon as I switch to a volumetric preset the sky is very dark no matter where I move the sun and you can never see the sun in the render - even when I make it a large visible object. Something really got hosed in the volumetric sky model when I installed this update. Also the sun icon is showing up in the scene facing the camera, so I know it should be rendered. I even moved the clouds to higher altitude and eliminated all fog and haze, just to see if the sun would show up - it is simply gone in the volumetric model.

Also - when I toggle the atmosphere from volumetric to standard the sun shows up in the render on standard. It is simply gone for volumetric sky render - that is the bug.

I guess I'll have to reinstall from the CD.

I've been using Bryce since version 1 and I am amazed at the skies and atmosphere in Vue. Once I get my volumetric sun back I think I'll be using Vue for a long time to come.

I also sent this to Steve, but I think he's getting swamped from this update ; )

thanks for listening.

Hello! This may sound obvious, but did you check in the lens flare options to make sure thatit was still turned on for the sun? If so, then you may have found a new bug. It's not happening at least in my PC version of 4.05. Now, that's only if it's the lens flare sun you're talking about, and not the "normal" sun you see when you have "Size of the sun" turned up under the Sun tab in the atmosphere editor. if that's the case, it doesn't work for me either when swiching to volumetric atmosphere. Now, you'll find that if you turn up the "Haze" slightly, you should see your sun appear, and you can change the haze color to a better sun color other than blue by double clicking on the little colored bar there. As for everything going all black, yeah. It takes some getting used to, but you absolutely have to have some degree of fog in the scene, and/or haze. The nature of volumetrics, I guess, since it's supposed to be simulating an atmosphere filled with particles of all sorts.

Here's a couple of screenshots, and then a quick pic... In this one, the haze settings I used in the atmosphere editor.

and the sun settings...

and how it looks...

I hope this was what you were looking for, and I have to thank you for bringing this up. It made me try a few things I've never tried before, and I've never been able to get a sun like this without using lens flare. Gonna have to try more of this. Like I said, I hope this helped, and that it isn't a bug. Don't need any more of those, you know. ;)

Thanks for your response and screen shots MikeJ, but yes it is a definite bug. I tried your same settings and got a very dark gray sky with no sun visible at all. In Vue4 the fog especially is needed for volumetrics because it is this simulation of moisture in the air that allows the light beams and glow to be seen. With a volumetric sky you don't even need lens flares because the sun glows behind all that 'moisture.' Before the update I could render volumetric skies and suns with absolutely no lens flare, just like the image you posted. The glow setting in volumetrics is what really makes the sun sing. The atmosphere controls make sense to me and I had a nicely tweaked sky before things went wonky. I am waiting to see if Steve can re-create the bug, but until then I will re-install from the CD. It may be a Mac only bug. The volumetrics are what made me want Vue in the first place - Bryce cannot do volumetric skies - only materials. You're welcome, I'm glad you're getting to explore what is under the hood - Vue4 is truly a very deep program - and I beta tested Bryce for many years , I should know ; ) I was right in the middle of trying to get sunbeams to come out of the sun (without having to fake it) when I lost everything. I'll save a backup of all my custom presets and re-install I guess. I'll post one of those test images too, if I can re-render them when I go back to the previous version. thanks for answering so quickly : )

Ah, well, I'm certainly sorry to hear that. :( Did you know, though, that when you run the updater, it creates a "Back" folder? At least on PC it does, I don't know what they did for Mac. But, if you have one, copying the contents of the Back folder to the main Vue directory eliminates having to reinstall. Well, I hope Steve can figure it out. I'm sure he can, though.

Yeah - it does have a back folder but I decided to clean re-install just to test what went wrong. I was right - 4.05 did hose up the sky - see my volumetric sun is back. I also found another bug in the CD version - see the purple weird artifacts showing up on the right side of the render? Those weren't showing up in Vue - they only show up *after* I save the image to pict and when I try to save to tiff the program crashes.

More Vue4 wonkiness - I sure hope Steve is listening.

Nice work on the scene in progress. That purple stuff is pretty odd; that's the first we've seen anyone with that, so it might also be a bug just for the Mac end of things. Maybe a problem writing the PICT format. Steve is so busy, please don't guess he might be reading this thread. If any right now, he's trying to keep up on the patch thread, and also with his voluminous e-mail. So please do report these errors, too -- the purple weirdness and the inability to save to TIFF. You can include a link to this thread so that he can view the example. :)

Thanks Varian. Lots more to do on this image - but the skies are sure nice in Vue : ) I already sent some stuff directly to Steve, but I'll hit him on Monday with these new things. The purple thing is a Mac only deal, but for sure the tiff crash I will tell him about and the thread here. I also did some testing and the sun doesn't seem to create volumetric shadows like it does on the PC. If you put a tall cube (rectangular) in front of a low volumetric sun does it kick out nice shadows above and below the object on the PC? On the Mac it only makes shadows on the ground and not the atmosphere. Now I know what the PC people felt like when Bryce first ported to the PC. Vue is so cool - this is gonna be great when we have platform parity and it runs nice on both systems. It's always a little rough at first when you first get a port on your platform - this is really version 1.0 for the Mac so I can be patient. I can see you guys have a great community here and that is what really makes an app thrive.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/~vue/

*If you put a tall cube (rectangular) in front of a low volumetric sun does it kick out nice shadows above and below the object on the PC?* Well, yes and no. *grin* They don't necessarily show up "automatically." It's a matter of balance between setting adjustments and the relationship of sun-to-camera angles. Make sure you have a volumetric atmosphere and the sun is set to volumetric. Open the volumetric sun settings and enable smoke/dust, and turn up the intensity. Depending on the effect you want to achieve, you might turn the intensity *way* up, like 300 or 400%. There are some additional helps in the Archive Tips Collection in the forum Annex (follow the link). :)

Glad you like the territory, tuckersaur. :) It's a shame it's not working, but it's been my experience that Steve does listen, and he works his butt off trying to come up with fixes. I know that porting Vue to the Mac was a major exercise in difficulty for them, and with the relative newness of OS X... I'm sure that made it harder. BUT, Steve will listen. he can't always reply quickly, but sometimes he replies immediately. I guess it all depends on the severity, but there have been a couple of times when I had the impression he whipped out a fix for something just specifically for me... like when he sent me a different version of Vue.exe just to fix this incredibly odd Shefflera vegetation problem I was having. It just refused to load, and I have no idea why, but the file he sent me fixed it. Go figure. Anyway, yeah, like Varian said, the volumetric shadows are troublesome, and it really does take a good bit of tweaking to get them to work as you'd like. I have a couple of "happy accident" in my gallery here, but man, that stuff can be a bitch trying to set up sometimes. I really hope Steve can get on these Mac problems. personally, I don't know the Mac at all, and I have no idea what to say when it appears to be a platform-specific problem. I will say though, the few Mac people who have so far come through here, have been very patient, kind and understanding. Thank you. :) Mike

Cool! I am gonna be lost in that tips archive for awhile - I was hoping you guys had something like that ; ) I have all the volumetric settings correct, but I will try blowing the intensity way out and adding some dust too. The reason I didn't add dust was I thought the fog and haze particles were taking care of that already. I'm not worried about Steve - I know he is working on it. As far as being patient, we Mac people are just happy to finally have Vue to play with. In our apps (until recently in Bryce5) we always had to build plants from scratch or fake them with alpha planes, etc. I like Vue's ability to grow plants - that's for sure. Even the terrain editor lets you do cooler things. The fluvial setting not only cut streams into the mountainside, they also really pile up the deposits at the base of mountains and create realistic looking alluvial fans. That is a nice touch being able to set the hardness and softness of the rock. Also I am enjoying playing with the underlying functions in the materials - I think there may be more horsepower in this than what I can do in the Bryce Deep Texture Editor. Overall at version 4, Vue really has a lot of depth to it, and I am excited about plumbing those depths. I have a feeling I will get the volumetrics working now with the tips you guys gave. I'll post a test image soon if I can get it working right. thanks for all your help.