The frame rate wouldn't have anything to do with texture flickering.

Yeah FattyB, a road tool would be freaking great! And that has me thinking that it would be great to have a kind of tileset brush painting feature in Vue, much like you get in game level creation tools (like the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset), or in SimCity to a certain degree. For instance, you make several building arrangments, then you can "paint" them all in at once over and over using one tool and a mouse click. Painting with the road tool would then carve a lane through that area, etc. I know, dreaming again. ; )

You are going to get a billion different suggestions for this question! A monitor is limited to how much detail it can display in one physical inch, so there is such a thing as too much resoltuion, which will only slow down your renders. A general rule of thimb to use is that you should make a texture map as big as you will ever see it on screen. In other words, if you have a rock texture and your camera passes right over that rock and it get's shown real close, then you need a bigger texture in order to have a quality look when you are up close. But if that rock is never going to be very close to the camera, say no more than 1 inch big on the screen, then using a large texture on that rock would be a waste of processor time. Keeping proximity to the camera in mind, if your texture looks pixelated, jagged or rough then you probably need a larger texture image. If it looks nice, you have a bit enough texture. A common misconception is to use a "high resolution" texture assuming it will increase the realism or detail of a render. This is not completely true. For example, a 4000x4000 image rendered on a character is really a waste of system resources and processor power unless you are rendering a tight shot of the head, or an extreem close up of the lips (and even then it's usually overkill). Always strive for a balance between speed and quality. There is a whole lot that could be said about this topic, but experimentation will get you the best results. Best of luck.

Well of course procedural textures are not going to transfer over. You would need the same procedural system in the other program, and that isn't the case. I'm sure e-on is only expecting image based "materials" to come over to vue, not procedurals, so I would still say it functions as expected. It's kind of a moot point to me if models come over with appropriate materials or not. From P4, there simply wasn't enough texturing capabillity to really want to recreate, and I always ended up adjusting textures to look better anyway, as well as adding diffuse values, etc. Most models in P5 don't really have that kind of information set up either, especially the "legacy" p4 models, so the same issues abound.

Well, if you have a digital camera, taking pictures of the ground is always a great bet. LOL But barring that, try these to get you started: http://perso.club-internet.fr/lemog/ http://textures.boom.ru/texture/building.htm http://www.animax.it/ There are some great free texture collections available both from Newtek and Alias: http://www.newtek.com/ http://www.alias.com/ And there are seemingly endless sources elsewhere on the web as well.

I know this may be a dumb question, but are you rendering at a high enough quality? I would suggest using "Broadcast" or "Ultra" for all final work. Your animation looks very much like the quick lower quality "Preview" render settings that Vue defaults to. That being said, I always use textures rather than procedurals, for so many reasons. You might think about trying a real image map on that ground plane rather than a procedural.

Sounds great Kutter. I have one more suggestion. Having created a lot of tutorials myself I am painfully aware of how ambitious I can be when planning a series of tutorials, and then how busy and unable I am to complete them all when i actually start producing them. ; ) You create some very rich art and have a lot ot offer other Vue artists who are already confortable with the program. i would hate to see you get halfway through the basic "manual" stuff and then run out of time to complete them, much less offer your more advanced knowledge to the community. Or worse yet to get caught in a loop where just as you finish the Vue4 basics Vue 5 comes out and you start again. : ) Perhaps you could do one or two "manual" videos, then one or two more advanced ones, and alternate like that? Whatever you choose, best of luck to you. I'm really interested to see the results because I am working on creating some video training myself (not of Vue) and would love to see more of this in the community.

I have imported an animation of Judy, and she came in with her materials perfectly.

You know, being able to set a key for only what is moving rather than automatically keying E V E R Y T H I N G would be a big step toward that true pro title. ; )

Surprisingly enough, in my experience this feature has worked exactly as advertised! ; ) Even cooler if you have Mover 4 to bring in a whole animation,

1. Particles for better smoke,rain,snow,fire etc. >2) Animation tools so that I don't need an outside applications for animating my own characters. >3) A Vue Simbiont Vue plugin so I can use Darktree textures. >4) Subdivision rendering. LOL! I'm not picking on you, but what you are really saying you want is a pro level 3D program like Maya, Lightwave, Max, C4D or SoftImage. It sounds like Vue Pro could use some improvements, like all software could, but I for one would prefer to see Vue Pro focus on improving it's landscape and vegetation tools rather than adding other features like particles and such. The program integration with other applications is the pipeline to these other features, and what Vue does it does better than the Pro leve apps. So why not fit in those workflows rather than trying to compete, which is what I think E-On appears to be going after in a very smart way.

Mover 4 is really cool though, it's well worth the money.

Hey Kutter. i think that is a great idea, as long as the tutorials are full of worthwhile content. In other words, a basic rehash of the manual won't be worth much, but if you could explore new techniques and applications of the tools they would be super cool. I would suggest a project based approach to tutorials like this. Perhaps you could walk viewers through techniques to create difference scenes, with 4 - 6 tutorials for each. Maybe an underwater series, an outer space series, a shoreline/coastal scene, etc. And rather than being particular, like "put in exactly these numbers in these boxes", you could show variations like "here are 3 different ways to make a dust storm, now add one to your scene". Something like that could be very cool.

I have a G4 768 MHz 10.2.8 OS. I downloaded the update (full update) >yesterday and installed it without any problem. Could it be a Stuffit >issue at your computer? Hmmm..... that's good thinking. Exceopt that I have two different stuffit versions on these two computers and I have the same problem with each one.

The Vue 4.2 full installer will not launch on either of my macintosh systems. Maybe the patch has a 10.2.8 issue? I have a G4 Powerbook (aluminum) and a Dual G4 800 Desktop and the update patch will not so much as even launch on either system. Double click and nothing at all happens. I've downloaded the file serveral times so there is something going on. Anyone else have this issue?