Thanks for the information - I will stick with Poser 4, mainly because I still have to learn to use it better, and also because it does everything I need the program to do! Once I have created a posed model, I just export to Vue d'Esprit for final renders Lester

Thanks for the information :) Knew it had to be something very simple!!! Lester

Just found the bit under Bumps for loading in a mapped picture as a bump map :) Makes things look reasonable from a distance, subject to the resolution of the mapped texture etc. Well it's a start ! Thanks for the help. Lester

Thanks Laurie and Varian, the problem is solved! On a different note, how can I incorporate bump maps with these models to give a relative representation of topographic heights, the bump tab is just for functions? As you are aware, there are certain planetary features, like Olympus Mons on Mars, that are not "flat" on the sphere, standing as it does 20km high! So if one has a proper grey-scale image for the whole height range of the planet how can this be combined with the 2-D colour map to create the illusion of topography? Mixing materials is not a solution. Thanks. Lester

I have readily imported files in 3DS and LWO (Lightwave) formats and COB files too into Vue4. Mostly worked with Star Trek meshes. Most of the time the textures, if present come along too, but I find that it is better to re-texture the meshes once in Vue. This is usually easy since the hierarchy of the mesh is preserved, not always mind you! In terms of ease of use the 3DS format seems pretty reliable, but would like to see the MAX format directly supported. Whatever format you import in, it's always best from my limited experience to redo the textures within Vue, somehow the textures that come along with some models don't always look good. Lester

As far as I know Wilbur does not have a size limitation, think it depends on how much memory it can grab from your machine. I have in the past got terrains with huge dimensions into wilbur! I had a look at the terrain editor, and it limits the terrain size to a maximum of 2048 x 2048! I can't find a way of increasing these values if I have a terrain with greater values to go in true-scale. Not sure how you could get a 5000 x 5000 pixel image map in without losing quality and true-scale Varian, but maybe there is a trick to it. I match the pixel size of the image map I load to the dimensions of the terrain I create in the terrain editor, which I assume is correct :) Lester

That's an interesting point about the relative position of the DEMS. The test I did was with two "adjacent" DEM's which are 1:24K UTM USGS ones, and as such the edges are not square which may explain some things possibly! It did look like they were importing as individual objects. I think the larger-scale DEM's may be unprojected so they could provide a test too. It should be noted that the USGS DEM's (1:24000) issued prior to June 2001 had positional and other errors present, so make sure you get the latest ones from: http://www.gisdatadepot.com

Thanks for the info Mike. I tried out 3Dem and it is fast and works with both the old style USGS DEM's and the new standard of SDTS. It doesn't write USGS DEM format output, but you create a binary terrain matrix. I load that into Wilbur (did I put the link up for that!) and save the image out as a true-height field for Vue4. By the way, is there a limit to how big an image map can be used in Vue4?

Forgot to say I'm using Vue4 version 4.02-02 if that is important :)

I have no problems importing PZ3 files into Vue4, and all the textures are available in the materials editor so you can modify things - make the model into a bronze statue! Vue4 works fine with the import and the textures are fine, even transparencies, once you know what settings to use!!

Thanks for the ideas. I tried doing multiple planes for the water to get a good fit around the edge of Crater Lake, and then grouped all the planes. Applied the water texture to the grouped planes and it looked fine, just like a single continuous surface. Seems to be a quick way to do it. It's fine for simple surface views of a lake. Not sure I understand how to do the method quoted by Jaywat. If I had two DEM's of the same dimensions and resolution, then the idea of Bop would work fine too. It's all experimentation and eventually solutions come up! It would be simpler if there was an option to do a polygon shape for the plane! If there are other ideas on this matter I'd be interested to hear of them. Lester

Just a suggestion, as someone new to Poser and Vue, but when I did my installation I installed Poser first, and then installed Vue 4. When Vue4 was installing it asked for the location of poser.exe as i recall, after all that it worked fine and recognised the pz3 file no problem. It may be something very simple as the order of installation ie Poser then Vue, but thats my guess for the day!

Thanks for the info Mike; changing the amplitude down did solve the line problem. I tested the default water again and set the wave amplitude to 0.05 and it looked fine; need to experiment more with all those other functions!

Thanks for the comments everyone! Some technical info on the Mars data; the data format is a gridded 2-byte integer binary file. The data is not a standard USGS DEM which are an ASCII format. Off the top of my head I can't think of the actual ground resolution in Kilometres but it's very good for planetary data (I'll have a check). If anyone is interested in this data let me know and I'll post the link. The Wilbur program is freeware and a very good utility to play round with and check DEM data out. The link is: http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html

Thanks Varian and MikeJ for the information. Everything works fine now. I tested both methods, changing the transparency for min and max to 100% in Poser before saving to a new PZ3 file, and also by setting the material properties in Vue4. Both methods give the same results, and it may be slightly easier to do the changes in Vue4 as this is where the final composition is going to be. Thanks again! Now I need to think about a composition..... !