heyas; okay, i have noticed something weird while working with vue. i'll take 2 things and make a boolean difference group. naturally, the wrong thing will be subtracting, so i open the difference and drag the one object up or down to where it belongs. but, when i do this, instead of MOVING the object, vue creates a duplicate. wha?? also, if i delete the wrong one, the whole boolean group goes kablooey. :/ anybody notice that? am i doing something funny to create a duplicate instead of move something in the world list?

Hi B, Guess that's the way it is. It did not tell us in the manual to do that...LOL! Bill

heya; i'm pretty sure the manual says, if you got the boolean difference the wrong way round, just drag the things to a different order.... in fact, i'll look it up... yep, right here. use the world browser to change the order. page 70. maybe its a bug? actually, they go on about dragging things in and out of boolean objects, but not within them. hmm... and whats with the thing that says if you try to group things that are linked, they wont be linked any more? do you get that when you try to make a group?

I think they are referring to with objects are being selected first for booleaning. Need not to change them in order in the world broser. "... try to group things that are linked, they wont be linked any more.." yes, you can't group them if they are already linked (union, booleaned difference, intersected). Bill

heya; no, the things i am grouping are not booleaned. booleans make groups, anyway. im trying to group ungrouped things, just lying there in the world browser. i THINK that when i drag things around in the world browser, and i throw something underneath something else, vue thinks i want to 'link' it, like for animating or something. but that's not what i mean. ::

The Booleans appear to be a bit buggy. I've found that deleting ANY element from a boolean difference will lock Vue up bigtime. I've never tried swapping the order, but it probably has something to do with the same bug. The solution is to UNgroup the boolean first, arrange the elements in the right order, then apply the boolean again (remember that it's always the first element MINUS the second etc.) There's another (unrelated) bug that will cause the same kind of lockup: NEVER try splitting materials on a mesh object that is a child in a group, move it to the ROOT of the layer first or Vue will have a seizure!

Hi Headhunter, Out of curosity after reading about deleting any element from a boolean difference, I did a cube booleaning a cylinder. Then I rendered to check. At the layer broswer, I deleted the cylinder in the difference and the result was that the cube remain and Vue was normal. I reverted back and this time move the cylinder out to the root. Again all is normal. Then I try removing the cube this time to the root with the cylinder still in the root, the system reported an operation error. So I am not having the problem (bug) you are experiencing. What do you think of all this? I'm using an intel with 384 Meg RAM running Win 98 (1st Edition). Bill

So it only crashed when you removed the object you subtracted from ? Did you try deleting the cube itself in the cub-minus-cylinder difference? Perhaps I only thought it was ANY element when it is only removing the parent that causes it to lock up. The "moving to the root" thing is unrelated to the boolean thing. try this: import a 3DS object with child groups (a Poser figure works). Select a child with more than one material & try to split the object mesh (Poly' Mesh Options) If I do this WITHOUT moving the mesh I want to split, it puts a bullet in Vue every time. I have to move the mesh into the root of the layer, split it, then move it back. I discovered this while trying to split the wand on the Necromancer in my "Minions..." pic into separate materials. See if it does the same on your system.

heya! yes, that happened to me! i was working on the poser lion, and threw a fur shader on the whole group. then i wanted to take out the eyes and whiskers and whatnot so if i edited the fur, i wouldnt have to re-do the different materials. so i took the eyes and stuff out and tried to make them a new group. well, it seemed to work okay, but when i went to save.... BOOM! crash, burn, and no file. i had to start all over again :/ (twice!) tesign... maybe it likes you, 'cause you're french? ;)

Hi B, Oh!...lion!? May be I give it a try to confirm if this is a bug by trying to do the same thing. What you have done sounded like what I did for the "Hungry Bass". The Bass was ungrouped and regrouped into two seperate group...one the fin set (to allow for transparency effect) and the rest of the seperate element of the fish as a whole. Material applied were the same. My earlier trial on Headhunter issue was that I uses primitive. anyway, I'll try and see what comes off with the lion thing, but I need a little more time. I'll post back here. No buddy, me ain't French, I am Chinese but not that those of the China, Homgkee, Vietnamese or Thai :) Qu'au sujet de vous, amicain? :o) Bill

Hi Headhunter, "So it only crashed when you removed the object you subtracted from ?" Remove here means "move" the objects (both cylinder and cube) from "Difference" to the root. Moving one object (either Cube or Cylinder) is still okay. "Did you try deleting the cube itself in the cub-minus-cylinder difference?" Yes, and in any sequence, it still did not 'killed' Vue. May be you should note that I am doing this with primitive and its best that you test it out. I have also assign each of the primitive object a basic material. try this: import a 3DS object with child groups (a Poser figure works). Select a child with more than one material & try to split the object mesh (Poly' Mesh Options) If I do this WITHOUT moving the mesh I want to split, it puts a bullet in Vue every time. I have to move the mesh into the root of the layer, split it, then move it back. I discovered this while trying to split the wand on the Necromancer in my "Minions..." pic into separate materials. I am not sure if the Bass example I explain to B post is sufficient or not or proved a similiar senerio, but the Bass fish do have a lot of seperate parts. The really funny thing is that Vue has never crash on me except for one occassion that I was "anyohow" doing more then one object grouping and "anyohow" placing them in orders. I was at 256 meg then, but with another 128 neg just added recently, it seem alright. I can't confirmed that this may be a RAM problem. But with sufficient Swap file space on this, things should be all right too. Let me know what you think. Have you try with any other 3ds or may be a poser or zygote character? Bill

Hello BSong, I loaded the poser lion in P4, exported as an wavefront obj and had this file (lion.obj) imported into Vue 3.0.2. I "Control" key and click the whiskers, left eye, right eye and drag them out of the Lion group and put them in the Root directory. This is done in the world Broswer. Render and save and all is well. This time I group the whiskers, left/right eyes in the Root directory and a prompt message saying "Grouping objects that are linked will detroy these link. Proceed?" and I selected "ok". Looking at the World Broswer now, I have a Gruop that contains the left and right eyes and whiskers. The Lion directory and all list of childs are also in the Root directory. Render and save, okay. This time I deleted the Grouping that contains the left/right eyes and whiskers. All seem normal...render and save...Okay! Well BSong and Headhunter, I really do not know how to conclude things here with my encountering verses both of yours. Did you guys upgrade with the new 3.0.3 patch? I found that the latest 3.0.1 patch was slightly different in file size then the very first 3.0.1 patch. The same goes for 3.0.2 Patch...both were the same size in file size but there is changes in it. It has allowed the red coral to install normally. I do not know what memory size do you guys have or Video card (ATI rage seen ti have some problem). Anyhow, it could be anything but it sure is weird! Bill

Bill, the ATI rage has compatibility issues? I am looking at a new laptop and it uses the Rage chip.....sighhhh. Well, it still can't be worse than what I have. I hope. Gail

Not to worry Gail. It may turn out to be all right. All this is very unpredictable sometime. Sometime, OEM product, let us say, Toshiba for example, they have their own R&D lab and what they do is that they buy over the rights for use of the graphic chip (sorta like technology transfer) and most of their chipset are sometime very much an OEM thing. Drivers downloaded from ATI site are normally for their own retail cards. The one that comes with Toshiba (example only) may have been tweak or slightly different. This makes the difference between laptop/notebook verses desktop computers. I also do not want you to be alarmed base on what I said. Its just for info...its so happened that there were two cases (I think I read from Artomania forum) and my one time own personal experience. ATI Rage is fantastic for games though :0) I had information from someone at Zygote to go get the Creative Lab GForce Pro. It has this DDR thing....in short, it takes the load of the CPU processing for 3D rendering. Affordable and 1/3 less than the cost of the 3D LAB GVX1. Please do let me know if your new Laptop/Notebook PC using ATI Rage has any problem with Vue 3. Thanks in advance. Bill

hmmm... i got the one patch, but i think it was #2. it was the latest one when i got it. my lion was a group, and it was in a group with a human figure. i threw the various non-fur pieces out of the lion group and into the 'cat and man' group, then grouped them. it would not save. anyhow, i'm not doing that again. i'll just use the materials browser to change the fur! :)

Bloodsong: The only problem I've had with grouping sibling objects in their own group is the fact that they sometimes shift position slightly. Never had one refuse to save. The shift may be related to that warning about destroying links in order to group objects, maybe removing the links shifts the origin or something (?) Bill: Did you try the experiment with splitting materials in the child of a mesh object? I've only tried it with 3DS objects but it seems to happen with consistency. As long as the object being split is in the layer root it works, but if it's a child in a group it freezes up.

Hi Headhunter, " with splitting materials in the child of a mesh object?"...I am not too sure if I understand you correctly but if you mean, giving a child which is a mesh object a different material from the parent (main), the answer is yes and no Vue hipcups here. I have tested this only with models from Zygote and Poser. " but if it's a child in a group it freezes up."...errr....I am a bit lost here, do you mean that grouping serveral child together? Just to be sure we are on the right frequency and I try further...by "child" you mean other part that is an object mesh itself that is link to form the model. Example whiskers, tail...etc..are child to the Lion figure body....right? May be it is best that you provide in detail step form what you are doing or send me the same file you working on so that I can simulate the same senario and see what happened. Bill

Aha! What we have here is a failure to communicate! No. The "splitting" I'm referring to is the splitting of a mesh object with more than one material assigned to it into separate objects. This is done in the "Polygon Mesh Options" box. (see pp.68-69 in the manual) Do this: Select a 3DS object that contains more than one material, now double-click on it to open the Options box. Beside Number of Materials you'll see a button that says "Split" When you split the mesh, each material becomes a separate object so that Vue can assign different textures to them. The problem is this: If the object that is being split is by itself in the root level of the layer, all is well... Vue says "Splitting Mesh" (or some such) and you get separate objects for each material. If, however, the object being split is an element of a group (e.g. a weapon in a figure's hand) Vue will begin to split the mesh & freeze. The object has to be moved to the root, then split, then put back in the hierarchy for it to work properly. I had been wondering if I'd been explaining myself clearly enough, but apparently not :) I'm a doer, not a teacher [G]...

Heya!...no I am not Bloodsong, this is Bill :) "Select a 3DS object that contains more than one material"..err, is it possible for you to send me one or the one you are doing, or any 3ds obkect that's giving you the crashes. I think things would 'byte' better as a we are 'tasting' the same apple :) I will them follow your steps and see if Vue fail bigtime. "I'm a doer, not a teacher [G]... "..I'm neither...me?...I'm curious kuz I'm a cat and a meow to you otherwise I get 'kill'...(curosity kills a cat) G Bill

It's easy to duplicate. Export a Poser figure as a 3DS file & select the head (which contains 7 materials) then double click on the head in the world browser and click on Split. It causes my Vue to crash every time. Aha! In the process of going thru the steps myself in order to describe it to you I noticed that I'm now getting an error message saying that a required DLL is not found! (SAINRHK7.DLL, whatever that is...) It still locks up on me when I try to split the mesh, but I don't recall getting any message before. Moving the head of the figure into the root of the layer & splitting it still works. Perhaps the file SAINRHK7.DLL has "gone bad" on my system. (It must be involved with grouping somehow) *** I just did a "find" for it & it doesn't exist. Maybe I need to reinstall. Ever see that message before? And do you have that DLL file on your system?

Headhunter, okay....I'm gonna take a poser figure head and try it out. Keep you posted in this thread. In the meantime, if you do reinstall and all is well, olease let us know too. Bill

Hi Headhunter, Okay....this is my finding and to your solution and the following is base on the poser 4 casual male whole figure : 1) Exporting as a 3Ds file and imported into Vue 3.0.2 is okay but caused an illegal option and forces Vue to close. This is when the exported file is "unchecked" for "Exporting Options" by group for each body part during export from Pz4. 2) If you export the 3Ds file with "Export Options" with export by groups for each body part "checked", in the Vue World broswer, you get access to all the parts 'splitted' but it may not be what you want...like the "hip" which still has other objects like, belt, pant,buckle and Head for lashes, tongue, teeth etc..which does not allow you to assign different material. Splitting it in Vue "Object Edit" does not help....illegal operation too. 3) If you export the file in Wavefront object format, all is well and you need not do any splitting. The Head for example has all the eyes, teeth, eye brow, lips, lashes etc...seperated where you can assign material to each its own. I hope the wavefront object file help you do what you want to do, that's assigning different material to part pieces of objects. For splitting up the polygon mesh thing in Vue3 with a 3Ds object file, yes, it crash. If you need to use and object that is 3Ds format, you may want to import it into poser and export it again in wavefront object format and see how things work out for you. Bill

I knew the OBJ format worked the way I wanted, I was only having problems with 3DS objects. When Vue crashed did it report a missing DLL or just Illegal Operation ? At first (on my sys) it would hang and not respond to anything, now it pretends to start splitting & reports missing SAINRHK7.DLL. (Altho I haven't tried it again with the mesh that made it hang up the 1st time, maybe you get different errors depending on the mesh?) I've never got an Illegal Op' message tho. If you move the object (e.g. the head) to the root of the level & split it everything is fine... I don't know why. BTW, rather than go to the trouble of reinstalling Vue, I was going to simply replace the missing DLL from the CD -- only to find out that it isn't there! Do you have SAINRHK7.DLL on your system ?

Vue did try to split the stuff and its only about the last one eight of the operation that the illegal operation dialog message came on. I have not received any other error messages. I tried this serveral time and it happened all the same with 3Ds file. I was however, to close the error message and quit task without a cold reboot. I did a search for "SAINRHK7.DLL" in my system but in vain. Bill

That's about the same point I'm getting the error on mine, it starts tooling along like it's doing something and then it gives me a missing DLL error. As you mentioned, I can quit w/o rebooting when I get this error. Previously it wouldn't even pop up the "Splitting" dialog, it just froze. I have no idea what the SAINRHK7.DLL thing is, or why it's causing me trouble. It doesn't exist on my system either, but Vue seems to notice it's missing! This is weird...

Hope e-on is reading this. Bill

We're their biggest fans! You'd hope they would try to keep up with their fan club! [G] At least it's a bug we can find a way around!