No problem, and Siggraph finished the 10th i believe, neat stuff anyhow.

Well i have not done much testing for Poser in Vue. But from what i heard the shader tree is now correct in Vue, not phong. Also Vue has a cartoon material that comes with it now.

Well you can adjust that part of the cloud, just that i like it darker sometimes.  :)

Well it depends on what software you use it with. I have used it with Maya so i do not know about the max version. But Maya you can use either Mental Ray or the Maya Software Render. All of which is dependent on what version you purchase. But i do prefer Mental Ray. Glad you got it working and hope you enjoy it :)

Message edited on: 12/21/2005 20:32

Well i have also been a beta tester for xStream. I have not encountered this problem so unfortunately i cannot say exactly what causes the error. However i may get in contact with e-on for you if you would like? PS- Documentation is not yet fully released as xStream is currently a pre-release. Full documentation should be included when xStream is fully released.

First off, Vue never claimed to be a high end 3D app, it is mostly a terrain or scene program. However it is starting to have great things added like GI, HDR support, etc. But it still is not a high end 3D app so it should not be compared to those. As far as xStream goes well try and create clouds, landscape, foliage, trees and then try to animate it in your 3D app. It is very time consuming, this product is by far much faster and not to mention you can finally have great skies in Maya. You cant judge until you try it for your self! *Ps. i don't work at e-on, i am simply a beta tester.

Message edited on: 12/17/2005 10:48

Well a variety of sites do have hdr images that are free.Regarding quality, it depends on the setup you use. For instance Cinema 4D supports hdr images and there are multiple ways of using them and different setups as well. Same goes for Maya, Softimage, etc. But this take time to setup. I myself just upgraded to Vue 5 from Vue 4 and i must say that i am very impressed by the results of hdri in Vue. It seems that they have integrated them well. Setup takes only a few minutes. E-on Software actually have a tutorial about this subject so be sure to check it out. Hope it helps, -LeFrog

Message edited on: 12/13/2005 16:43

Thank you all for your replies. I guess i can go the route of keyframe animation, but i really wanted to have dynamic hair.

Thanks. I shall give it a go. If i do not succeed i will probably just do it in Maya.

Well since money is involved maybe i shall enter ;) But i ain't a huge RE fan!

Well i had also received the CE version with 3D world mag, i then upgraded it to CE+, and now i have the R8.5 XL package. Compared to a lot of apps Cinema is priced good. And the module system is great, you buy simply what you need. I have been using Cinema since version 6, and have tried out other apps like 3ds max, maya, softimage. But i will stay with Cinema. Also like mentionned you cannot compare a high end 3d app to a program that is specifically for landscapes and such. But i do use Vue for landscapes!

Well basically png can be thought of as advanced gif images, gif images are limited to the 256 colors as opposed to png where you can have much more of a color gamut. I do not think however that png's can store alpha channel information (but then i rarely use them)i usually use tiff images instead. So the answer is Photoshop does support png but i do not believe it supports alpha channel info.