I got a second hand Nvidia Quadro4 980 XGL board from Ebay and its solved all my 'professional graphics' problems. I recommend it.

It went OK for me. Had you registered Vue 4? Perhaps they don't have a record of you.

Vue renders those trees in a flash, compositing is the way to go. Plus, we don't know whether the tree blowing in the wind effect translates into the LW scene anyway. The real news as far as I'm concerned with VP is the camera/light sync.

I agree that sample LW scenes would be very useful.

Knuckle Martin - Having read the details, as well as scrutinising the 5 minute version of the demo video it looks as though LW will NOT use VPs procedural texturing algorithms, but as nggalai said will UV map them. It also appears (as again nggalai said) that the resolution is user definable, so basically we choose how large we want our scenes/models to be. Couple this ability with the camera & light syncronisation and I think most every problem can be overcome. Vue will I think always render its scenes better than LW but if you want to put an LW sequence in, just need to export the landcape for shadowing/occluding purposes only. Plus, it'll be a great vegetation tool.

This is fantastic news :) Some time ago I was asking about importing camera data from LW, and now here it is. I only need to ask one question: Is there camera/light import and export? Oh, and the wind effect on the veg - superb.

Oh, I mean data : )

Yep, I think blurring will be your best & easiest option. The only thing to think about is how much blur to add, not enough and stepping will still be apparent, too much and other detail will be lost. My suggestion would be to make several copies and blur them to different degrees from barely noticable to quite severe, and see which works best. It will depend on the original's resolution as well. BTW, where did you get the image?

In my experience the people with pirated PS are home-based hobbyists who get it from some place like ebay, whereas the companies, the ones who use it to make money, have the real deal. Adobe probably are just being pragmatic about it, if you absolutely had to pay for PS, lots of people at home who have 'casual' pirate copies simply wouldn't bother. So Adobe haven't lost much, nor would they gain much. Its the money making companies and freelancers who Adobe are targetting, quite successfully. I mean, PS isn't really that expensive in business terms.

I'm running Win2000 SP3 and the latest Vue update, so far no problems, although I don't use it as often now.

Attached Link: http://perso.club-internet.fr/lemog/#

I use Windows 2000 Pro and with the exception of a few games runs everything better than any other OS I've used. (I haven't used XP). Since moving to Win 2000 I've never had a windows crash. Applications still crash very occasionally, but it doesn't drag the entire system down.

So .lwo files are derivative of .dfx files? Perhaps Vue is exporting an old Lightwave .lwo format that is limited to 65,000 polys? If thats the case then they (Eon) need to update their export file formats.

As an aside, and just for my own interest, how will you matchmove the bluescreen person with the animation footage?

OK you're looking at a lot of things, this suggestion is probably more of a long shot but you never know... Are the errant renders saved as JPG images? Its possible that if you're looking at them as JPEG files then you could be seeing some loss of detail due to compression.