I just posted one of my first Vue 3 pictures in the Vue gallery. It's pretty lame if you compare it to you pros, but hey, it is my first. How can I improve on it. It's the Florida Summer pic. Thanks, Dave

It's a good image, Dave, and a great start for your first time out. I left my comments in the gallery, but will repeat them in more detail here. 1) the beam of light from the lighthouse is too solid. If you did that in Vue, you can play around with the transparency settings on whatever material you used. A non reflective tinted glass material would probably work very well there. If it was post production, a transparency layer might be the way to go with that. It would give you the basic outline, a bit of color, but would reduce the solidity. 2) the waves that the wind is whipping up are just too spiked. I presume these were made with the smudge tool. I would add just a bit of white (a few streaks that can be smudged into the gray) for a foamy look and then experiment with curls. Curl and feather and you can have some awesome waves. It's just a matter of practice. Those were the only two areas where I can offer helpful advice. The motion blur on the trees isn't quite right, but I'm not sure how to fix that. Maybe someone with more experience can give you some help on that one. Overall, I like this image. I can almost feel the wind. Kate

Kate, I know, I'm having major problems with the lighting in Vue. I had to put the spotlight into a cone to be able to see the light. I then had to color the cone yellow. I set all transparency to 100%, but it still looks solid. Maybe I should just try to do it in Photoshop? Or is there an easy way to do lighting in Vue, and I just can't figure it out? Thanks, Dave

Dear Dave, your pic would like beautyful without post processing. I agr with Kate about the light beam. Have a look at my tutorials for beginners. It shows you exactly how to create a light beam in Vue (tutorials for beginners) at http://start.at/arte The waves woumd look much better if you use waves from Vue material. Powt processing makes the water become unrealistic. Try to rectify and you will see you get a very beautyful result for your picture. Regards, Guitta

Good advice from Guitta on the water. I completely forgot about the animated wave material (slap my forehead and say "Doh!") in Vue. Same for the light beam tutorial. I think instead of a spot light I would have used maybe a directional light. Can't understand why the spot didn't work, though. Kate

heya; about the light: if you put a light in the scene.... it's just a light source, not a real light bulb. in other words, putting a spotlight in the picture won't make a spotlight show up, you'd have to build a spot light model to put the spotlight IN. see? :) what you were trying to do is make a 'volumetric light,' right? (er, haven't seen the pic yet, i should shut up, huh? ;) ) to do THAT, in vue, you need to make a primitive and turn it into light. that is done with the materials, using the transparency tab. if you make the cone fuzzy additive, it will appear to be a non-solid light beam in the picture. (you may have to layer several, vue's additive things are really subtle.)