Wow - it's incredibly difficult to single out a winner from such a great line up. I think Alla's "Fairy Light" just pips the post for me by a whisker, though.

Wow - the warm colours and mood of this piece are lovely! First rate. :)

With regard to improving the imported Poser materials I've found that you invariably have to experiment based on the lighting of your scene - I've yet to find a 'one setting fits all' solution. However, the eyes are easy to fix - in the materials browser find a material called 'EyeBall' and load in 'Standard Glass' in its place - this will give the eyes a realistic highlight. For the skin, try experimenting with the following highlight values: Global Intensity: 10% - 40% Global Size: 5% - 30% And set the highlight to a light-to-mid tan or pink (for caucasion skin). As I say, you'll need to play about depending on your lighting set-up to get the look your after. Hope this helps. K.

Reflection maps in Poser are essentially there because Poser doesn't have a ray-tracing renderer and cannot therefore reproduce 'real' reflectivity in materials. Other packages provide them largely for use with isolated renders used in compositing, etc. As Vue is primarily designed as a landscape generator it makes little sense for it to have reflection maps - there's always going to be an environment to reflect and thus no need to fake it. They may get introduced in later versions as more people are using view for non-landscape pictures. With regard to depth-of-field, if the render times are too high for you using DOF then you could try faking it using the depth map produces whenever Vue renders. If you load this into Photoshop you can you use it to filter a blur over the image - this only works well if the focus is in the foreground however... Cool pic by the way.

Truespace 4.3 for modelling. Photoshop 6 for textures. Poser 4 for figure work. Vue for scene creation/rendering.

Oops! Sorry Mike, you're quite. I did click the nudity button when I uploaded the pic in the gallery but forgot about it on this post. Consider my wrist slapped! K.

Looks superb! And just to show my film geek credentials, the puzzle box in Hellraiser was called a 'Lament Configuration'.

For those here who are trueSpace users may I recommend the Objectman (http://www.gothicsystems.bizland.com/) TSX (plug-in) as a far cheaper and very effective alternitive to 3D Exploration or it's kin. There's something in me that really really objects to paying more for an object format conversion utility than all of my most used 3D software put together.... K.

It's actually pretty good - but too get it more spooky I'd perhaps try and make it more soft-edged. You could maybe experiment with the Fuzzy material settings? In general the spookiness of the thing will largely depend on the setting you place it in - I probably wouldn't runaway if I saw if it a McDonalds but if I turned a corner in a moon-lit graveyard and saw it it would be a different story! Context is everything. I think it might be improved if there were some sort of recognisable face - however abstract or ghoulish - that I could recognise in it... K.

Myske - when the manual talks about Object Space its sometimes means the coordinate system (Object/World) that is used when making a transformation (ie rotate, move, changing the size, etc) on that object. When you change an object in Object Space your changes are relative to the object's own axis but if you change it in World Space it is relative to the Worlds axis (ie coordinates 0,0,0). Sometimes these can lead to different results. But there's no control to switch between one or the other. Basically if you change an object using the Object Properties Numerics tab you are changing it using its own Object Space; but if you change it by dragging its control handles in one of the 3D views you are changing it using the World Space. Having said all that, the tickbox in your screen capture only applies to the material UV mapping of the object. Hope this post isn't too confusing!! K.

I assume this was the old way of handling UV mapping? If so it has been replaced by the pull-down menu in the top right-hand corner of the Material Editor. Ticking 'Object Space' above would presumabely be the same as setting this drop-down to 'Object - Standard'. It essentially means that the material is mapped relative to the object rather than world coordinates. Unless someone else know better? Hope this helps. K.

Dez - I saw this in print ad in Computer Arts magazine. I can't see anything about it at the PCFormat site but then there was nothing about their next issue at all. There discussing it at the Cinema 4D forum if you want more info (http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12400&Form.ShowMessage=571711) I haven't seen TS2 on a cover CD for ages. The last Caligari give away was an 'SE' version of TS 3 but again that was a long time ago. Keep your eyes peeled though - you never know! K.

Gotta love those freebies! It works though - I first got Vue 2, Poser 3 and trueSpace 2 as coverdisk freebies and ended up upgrading all of them. I never did upgrade my Bryce 3D freebie - odd that... ;)

I've never had much success importing trueSpace files - the Vue manual does state that it will import trueSpace 2 files - I use 4.3 so I just figured it was stumbling over the newer features. Saving my trueSpace models as 3DS from trueSpace usually did the trick.

Just so you know, 90% of the DXF models at 3D Cafe also have versions in their native format, usually 3DS, and if the model is shown with textures in the thumb it'll be this file that contains them. The DXF files are a bit of a throwback - DXF was the first 'universal' format that sprang up - pretty much everything can import a DXF. Nowadays, pretty much everything can import (or at least make a game effort) 3DS files so it's sort of supplanted the DXF format for model sharing. Definately check out the SciFi 3D link above - they're easily the best Star Wars models in the public domain. By the way - does anyone know if the Star Wars Modelling Alliance (SWMA) is ever coming back?