It is a pity for the morale of the artists to have their image ranked down after they had worked hard and managed to get an excellent. I didn't enjoy yesterday's event as I have come to know the artists and their works and felt for them under the situation. On the other hand this incident did highlight the ranking issue. As a result of yesterday's 'ranking down', the images that didn't get hit, remained excellent and the ones that did get hit ranged from good to great. This was the first time that a page of pictures showed anything but excellent (rarely great) or nothing. It can be upsetting to have your image ranked lower when you thought it was the best picture you ever did, but this has helped me over the past 3 months to produce images much better than I anticipated. It's hard not to identify images by excellent or nothing but do its generally based on the number of ranks (and/or comments). This is also not a true indicator either as many well known artists in Vue and other galleries have such a great following of fans that they get many comments because they are on many people's favourites lists. Even when they don't do a great one (happens to every artist throught-out history). Also, if you change your rendering tool, and therefore your gallery, you take your fans, that have you on their favourite lists, and get a new lot of fans from the next gallery. Most people in the other galleries don't know my art exists, but I do sometimes get a comment come through :). There are many complex ranking systems but many fail as there is generally a hole in them or they are abused (look at the Olympics, its very difficult to even find the fastest person... no drugs, bionics, amature, genetics...rules/caveats). In many areas ranking is often done by professionals (those that have a proven success in that field). This can be the same for these galleries. The artists that have highly ranked images over time get more weight. Artists that have contributed images over time get more weight. Artists that have ranked other images over time get more weight. Finally non-contributors over time get some weight. All these weights add up so a great artist that contributes, gets ranked well and also ranks gets weighted the most. Artists that stop ranking others and/or contributing begin to lose their weight (over a long time). This system would have to have a ceiling as a single rank from a 'brilliant' artist would tip the scales. This may control some of the problems. Just food for thought sacada

A bath or hot tub.

Congratulations pmermino. Brilliant wave and image. Well done. Congrats also to raffyraffy. Excellent image.

12

Looks great. The use of your graphics make it look superb. It has all the standard links and I like the use of the double level menu, very effective and still artistic. You should be used to making your icons a reasonable downloadable size so that should be OK. Make sure you have hit counters on each page to get an idea of where people like to browse (most services offer this nowadays) and also where people stop and move on. Good luck and happy hits.

Excellent tute and reference. Well done.

Thank you. They are terrific.

Revisiting the points I was trying to make.

Without HT on, Vue is definately utilising both processes to the max (100% each for the entire job). During this process running other applications becomes clunky and I often give up (save rendering until night).

With HT on I can now use other applications with ease with only a 5% cost to rendering time.

Sacada.

PS. davidrivera: Specs = 2.66 each and its vvvveeeeerrrrryyyy nice. Though I create more complicated scenes now I have more power. My latest image (You Cheated!!!) had a .vue file of 215 megs, included DOF and took over 28 hours to render (with HT off) and both processors at 100%.

Excellent detail. Thanks.

The drop function... bottom of left toolbar. Place your tree above the terrain and the press the drop. Maybe slight adjustment if very steep. For best results do all you trees with above view for placement. Then lift them all up. Next select one at a time and drop each (Shift D).

Thanks Thalaxis. I'm not interested in post work. Will think of something.

Terminology may be wrong but effect is the same. What I am seeing is random streaks from highly reflective surfaces such a cars, chrome etc. This could be referred to as "Glitter", "hot spot" or "bloom". It is a natural effect as you can see it with your eyes and don't require a camera (especially around sunset - 1 hr). There is an actual glitter plugin in Lightwave that produces this effect but it looks as though nothing available for Vue.

Thanks for the replies. Is is a shame that it is a limitation of Vue as I had quite a few ideas utilising reflecting lens flares. I don't ever do post work as I always like to push the limits of the renderer, but maybe post is somewhere I could look into later.

I also found it very slow (and failing), especially with the top 20... but, I did notice that a lot of the renderosity home page has changed, so maybe there was intensive maintenance and updating yesterday.

MightyPete,

The thread you just posted has dead links to the wish lists. Can you post a pointer to these lists so we newbies can see them since it is now over 6 months since the wishes where made.

I have only been Vueing for 2 months and am already looking forward to many of the wishes listed in the thread.

Thanks.