The demo only aloows 640x480 renders to screen so this is a screen cap. What I've noticed is the images all come out crisp and sharp. A pass with a blur would eliminate this but is there a way for Vue to blur as objects get farther? Also how are reflection maps handled in Vue. They appear different than Poser.

Hi Mason, Pretty cool picture. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use that DAZ octopus (if it is the DAZ one) before. I bought it well over a year ago and still haven't gotten around to it. Anyway, to answer your question, have a look at this thread about Depth Of Field. It's in there, it's just a little tricky. It also will add considerably to render time. As for the reflection maps, I'm not sure. Hopefully omeone else will have something to say, but I don't think it's ever come up around here. The Poser imports with reflection maps seem to cause Vue to apply the "mirror" material to any object with a reflection map, as far as I can remember.

heyas; vue doesn't use reflection maps. if you import a pz3 with a reflection map applied to whatever materials, vue assigns them a reflectivity percentage, but no colour info or anything. so they all end up looking silvery.

I know virtually nothing about reflection maps. I don't use them in Poser at all, though I can certainly see the benefit of them.

Reflection maps in Poser are essentially there because Poser doesn't have a ray-tracing renderer and cannot therefore reproduce 'real' reflectivity in materials. Other packages provide them largely for use with isolated renders used in compositing, etc. As Vue is primarily designed as a landscape generator it makes little sense for it to have reflection maps - there's always going to be an environment to reflect and thus no need to fake it. They may get introduced in later versions as more people are using view for non-landscape pictures. With regard to depth-of-field, if the render times are too high for you using DOF then you could try faking it using the depth map produces whenever Vue renders. If you load this into Photoshop you can you use it to filter a blur over the image - this only works well if the focus is in the foreground however... Cool pic by the way.