Thank you.  Shading rate 1.0 pixel samples 3 works great. If you change the shading rate to 1.25 then the H doesn't render correctly.  This seems to help and I appreciate it....

But I do have a specular map that has black for the continents and white for the oceans. How would I add this? In Poser I would put it under alternate specular or something like that but in VUE it's not quite that intuitive....tks

I have a pretty good model going - now I want to add some alternate specularity so the ocean gives of the right reflection. I have specular map but am unsure where to apply it. I tried adding it to the HIGHLIGHT tab but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Any ideas on this? I am trying to get some reflectivity of the sun out of the oceans.....

Oh the blue marble stuff looks petty good but I am looking for a mat I can apply to a sphere....

The Celestiamotherlode is great but for the EARTH pics the water is too dark to look natural. I'm looking for something that would render like we see when the shuttle is shown on tv and you can see the earth with its clouds and atmosphere and the water is always a lighter blue with just the right amount of reflection on it.

If you watch any sci-fi movie of recent that shows earth - well - it looks pretty good and real. That is the look I'm aiming for.  But most of the earth maps have water that is too dark and then there's the issue of cloud mats and atmospheres.  Thanks for the help and let me know if there is something else I should look at....

I tried putting all the props inside the other i.e make one part the PARENT.  I can lock the Parent easy enough but all the stuff linked as child parts can still me moved around....:(

I'll give the minFig a try - but it would be easier if all of this were in a screen like the Hierarchy editor so you could just click on a parent and everything below it for locking purposes......

So an Actor is a prop? That works - now how about selecting mulitple objects - is this available in the Heirarch editor where you can click down a list - I don't see it......

I can't get that method to work - I did a replace all and it goofed up the prop entirely.  So, to normaize the prop and all objects I can export as OBJ.  

How can I do this in such a way that when I import it back it comes back as separate objects parented but geometries and scales normalized??

I notice that when I export to OBJ and bring the same OBJ into VUE I am able to deal with any object in the group.  Is there a setting I can check when I reimport into Poser that will still allow me to access the pieces?

Renderfarm? I'm just me and small potatoes......I've settled on a vertical 960 pixels which is twice the 480 that I will compress to in mpg.  The render for 10 seconds runs about 18 hours with 65% quality in the AA and min 4 max 16.   I just press render and then go away for a while.   The render at 1080 vertical takes a lot longer but doesn't look that much better when put on DVD.  Thanks for all of your comments.  I wil definitely render the space craft separately in Poser and composite to the scene in VUE when not needing a direct interact with the scene in VUE......

Do I need a special editor to edit the PP2? Any tricks in saving it?

I was hoping there was a python utility that I could apply to a scaled primitive so that everything is reset to 100% but with the new size in place.  Thanks for your help.

Yes if I composite the space ship it will look better however I have the ship flying over a spectral cloud layer and diving down through it.  So compositing then becomes tricky and I wanted a more realistic "dive" into the clouds......

One more question - in using these settings (min 4 max 16 quality 60%) and intending to author an animation to DVD what would be the vertical resolution to use? This will not be High Def but rather shown on a DVD player with hdmi in standard 480P upconverted to 720P.  

The reason I am asking is that if I use 720 - it looks okay but has artifacting and some fuzziness. It gets better when I go to 960 and even better at 1080 vertical resolution.   I don't know if I am overkilling this going above 720.  I just want it to be the best for what the eye can see and not take a millenium to render.   Any suggestion would be appreciated from your experiences on this....

Thanks!  Min 4, Max 16 and Quality 60% - that is what I was wanting.  I've been dinking around for days with different settings and resulting render times. I was curious what VUE had for the broadcast preset......

I have VUE Esprit and do NOt have that option. Can you tell me what the anti-alias setting is for Broadcast?  Or if there is another way to get to this that would be great.  I'm not sure why this is not available to me in Esprit....