You do have to move the camera or change the focal length. Even if you change the rendering aspect ratio, Vue will attempt to keep the framing the same.

As in my above example, I had a 4:3 image. I needed to add to the sides to create a 16:9 image, but changing the aspect ratio in Vue simply cropped the top and bottom of the 4:3 image to make it 16:9! I could have achieved the same effect in photoshop, but obviously this isn't what I wanted. This is why I had to move the camera back and change the focal length.

That is the problem with 3D software...it all comes back to a camera. This is nice because if you are used to using cameras in the real world, you can transfer that knowledge to 3D...but if you don't know how to use cameras, it can bite you! Think of how you would achieve that effect in the real world...you would have to step back and take a larger picture.

Maybe you have seen these consumer film cameras several years ago that offered a "panoramic" view? All they did was crop the image in the middle. Vue does the same thing.

That's going to be difficult. I've had to do something similar with an animation. Originally I did it in 4:3 aspect ratio then had to change it to 16:9. This is only about 33% more screen size. I could do this by moving the camera back and making it have a wider angle, say, changing a 35mm lens to 27mm. This worked fairly well for this project. The 4:3 version matched the 16:9 version very well, except of course the 16:9 version had more on the sides.

However, when you increase the lens focal length like that, it can introduce distortion. For your project, you might have to photoshop it or render at extreme resolutions with the camera further away from the scene. Vue will do an area render so you can render it in sections.

The latest update seems to be working much better for me. When Vue 6 final first came out, I had the same problem you describe. Scenes that loaded just fine in 5 couldn't even load in 6. Now I get much better performance out of 6, and I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I'm on XP64 and running Vue x64. I have 6 gig RAM in this machine and Vue can use more of it without crashing (well, it can use about 2 gb instead of the 1.3 vue 5 could use before crashing).

That's a good point. I remember being very impressed with their Cinematics in Diablo, but I didn't know those were done in house. WIth the high budget of games these days, not many studios can afford to do their own movie quality cinematics. Then again, not many studios have the income Blizzard does from WoW...

Actually I have xStream too and I tried it on my dual opteron and both versions install. When I tried it on my older Athlon 64 it would only install the 64 bit. 32 bit would freeze up. Maybe a problem with that machine? But yeah, I can confirm you can install both 32 and 64 bit versions of Vue 6 xStream, even to the default directories.

Maybe that's the problem...different install paths. XP64 has two program file directories: Program Files and Program Files (x86). The pre-release installed the proper version in the proper directory, but maybe the final doesn't differentiate and that's why I was having the installation problem. I'll try it out tonight as I want to use my skinvue too...

You could with the pre-release but it seems the final won't let you (I get errors when trying to install the 32 bit version on XP64).

Trepz...

1). Animated Poser files. Exporting to .obj doesn't keep the animation.

2). Reposing. Maybe that pose you have is close to what you want, but maybe it is a bit off for the scene you are working on. Now you have to export the .obj again and again and again until it is just right, instead of simply re-saving the poser file and having Vue automatically update it...

Yes, it will mix the elements, in a way...but the lighting never matches and right now, the 3ds max version has a huge bug where it won't properly cast shadows on objects in both scenes, so it isn't properly integrated 100% like you say.

The lighting is the most difficult thing to work with, because the native objects use the native lighting in your scene and aren't affected the same way by the vue lighting, even if it is supposed to carry over. The lighting is so bad that the final result "looks" like a bad composite.

You can see this even on e-on's demo renders for xStream.

xStream is just Vue 6 Infinite + plugins for other 3D packages. It will render your vue scene as a background and composite your other 3D package's elements into the render. That being said, it doesn't work quite right at this time. And if you think Vue 6 Infinite has problems (memory, etc.) just wait until you try to use xStream...

At least version 6 is sorta usable (I use it with 3ds max/mental ray). Version 5 was totally unusable.

Thanks for the treasure hunt! I usually don't participate in these type of things because I don't have the time if there is only going to be one winner, but with this one, anyone who finds it gets the prize. Plus I love Digital Anvil's models.

Quote - So my final conclusion is that you can't make pre-animated meshes without MAX, and that even if you could, Poser animations work better.

That is my experience. Now I have used 3ds max to export animations as pre-animated meshes and it does work...just extremely slow. I used it to create some physics animations using the Reactor engine in Max. The results were fine, but I much prefer using Poser for importing animations.

E-on has an export plugin for 3ds max that will export pre-animated meshes. The problem is that these meshes update extremely slow and are for the most part almost unusable. Try importing one of the pre-animated human meshes they have and see how unresponsive vue becomes as soon as the mesh is loaded in.

That is why I use poser to import all my animations.

As far as I know, only 3ds max has a pre-animated mesh export feature to vue and it is unsupported software written by e-on.

Are the other characters going to be solders or other types of characters? I've very interested in the concept and I don't mind that the character is a solder, but right now I'm looking for medieval soldiers :)

The biggest selling point for me was multiple undo. Can't think how many times I wished I could just undo the last few steps when using P5.