I like the way the foreground and background materials blend nicely. Are you using a displacement mapping technique for that? The pond itself looks a little like a mudbath, but I assume a last chance pond would...8^) Good WIP! MN

Quite honestly, I don't know. I've never had the problem of a file that will not open except once. I then opened the backup file and it worked. I believe that when you save a file by hitting the 'save' button it will update the backup file as well. I could be wrong because I've never dealt with a problem like this. Perhaps someone from e-on can elucidate the answer for us. I do think that the file extension should always be .vue or .bak and not .01vue or .02bak Sorry I don't know more about the file system. MN

Thanks, Paul. That makes things much better. I suppose that there are fewer "surfaces" to refract the light with the cutting surface made one sided. MN

In the options panel you can check "Make backup copies (.bak) when saving scenes." This will automatically back the files up (and you can REALLY eat HD space!) MN

The blue gunk strikes again,eh? I, too, thought that problem had been fixed, especially with the latest patch installed. In any case, I followed your suggestions, Varian, and here is the result. 1st image is the default Vue Whiskey bottle with the 'crystal' material. Inside is a cylinder of the default clear water. It renders fine, as does a boolean operation of nested and one stretched cylinders to make a glass (my most common method of making glasses...) Everything looks good so far. In the second image I copied and pasted the interior cylinder and dragged the Whisky liquid's material onto the new cylinder, which was compressed and slightly reduced in size so as not to be completely coincident with the inside of the boolean. As you can see, blue gunk abounds. The third image shows what happened after applying Varian's trick. I changed the fade out color of the crystal material and changed the color of the water to white. It looks much better, although I still don't think it looks especially realistic. To me it appears that the water is almost glowing (and it shouldn't be) like there is a translucent material between the glass and the liquid. I really hadn't had this problem until I applied the latest patch (Vue 4.2). I thank you for your reply, Varian, and especially for not saying "Check the backroom" for that was what I did before I posted the question. (Always check the faq first, right?) MN

Best wishes to you both! -Dr. Nash

Here is the cut and pasted e-mail from E-on. I have been using Vue on an Athlon 900MHz machine and have recently purchased a new box. (Sony VAIO PCV-RS 320 P4 2.53 GHz with 'hyperthreading') Vue does not, suprisingly, seem to run faster. In fact sometimes it seems to run slower than on my old machine. Vue has crashed occasionally under the new XP system and when I attempt a Ctrl-Atl-Delete end program the cpu usage shows only 50 percent. Does Vue support 'hyperthreading' technology on a single CPU system? If not, are there any updates in the works to take advantage of it? I understand this is not a high priority, but any users that purchase a new system will undoubtedly have a "Hyperthreaded" system. Any correspondence will be appreciated. Dr. Michael R. Nash Posted by: Steve Bell On: 2003/07/16 12:17:32 Hi Michael, I'm not all that surprised. The Athlon is really good at 3D rendering, while the P4 is not... Vue 4 is not designed to benefit from HyperThreading technology. I don't know if any updates are in the works, but what i do know is that you should at least update to the latest release (currently 4.12). Best regards. Steve Bell I am now running an render test. I'll report on it shortly. Thanks for the reply, Thalaxis MN

Thalaxis, Thanks for your response, but I think you may have missed the point of my message. The VAIO IS a desktop and it runs the 2.59GHZ p4 and is labeled as using hyperthreading, which, although in a non-technical forum I used a euphamism, I understand reserves system resources by allowing programs which are DESIGNED to take advantage of hyperthreading to run more efficiently by "threading" the instructions through the processor. The euphamism was used since at full burn the system shows only 50 percent processor usage. It also doesn't FEEL 2 and a half times faster than my old Athlon 900Mhz. I am, of course, using the memory which came suplied (512 meg) and the supplied video accelerator. The jist of my message is that Vue, according to Steve Bell of E-ON, is NOT designed to use hyperthreading and therefore I am not getting the full advantage of the processor. Some of the forums on Hyperthreading support this statement if the application was not designed to take advantage of it. (Photoshop is. Vue is not.) I suppose what I was really asking in the last sentence was how to access the BIOS on this computer? On splash/startup I see no "hit F4 for setup" or anything like that. It seems that no matter what keys I touch it still just boots up to XP. Sony, of course, merely says "Not allowing windows access to it's resources can damage the system. We recommend not tampering with the BIOS settings which are designed for maximum performance of your new SONY VAIO system" Sorry for any mixup there. The question remains, how do you access the BIOS on this machine since Sony is not going to be forthcoming on this subject? Dr. Michael R. Nash

According to Steve Bell, Vue does not take advantage of Hyperthreading. I recently purchased a new Sony Vaio P4 2.5GHZ and it seems that Vue runs SLOWER than on my Athlon 900mHz. It looks like the computer is using only 50 percent of the processor to render. So, you can turn this hyperthreading off? Someone PLEASE tell me how, since all I can get from Sony is "Hyperthreading is a wonderful new performance enhancer that increases...blah blah balh." Do I do it through the bios? Is there a way using XP (I really DON'T like XP) to turn it off? I'd much rather have ONE processor chewing on this program at 2.5 Ghz than having two VIRTUAL processors at 1.25 Ghz... -Dr. Nash

Outstanding! I'm always very appreciative of your generosity, Alain! MN