They already have a male lorez figure:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/0/lorez-figures-modern?item=6369&cat=&_m=d

The prices of the two together are a little much for me right now, but my dreams of absolutely massive crowd scenes have moved me to put them on the wish list...

Absolutely. Are you working on something?

If you can save up for a while and get the MacPro, obviously you should, but I just wanted to mention that I have the 24" iMac, and it works very nicely with Vue. So if your budget and schedule require you to buy sooner --as mine did-- an iMac isn't a poor choice.

Heh. I bought Vue6i on September 29. Their cutoff date for the late buyer discount is October 1. I guess I should have been psychic.

Not that I'd necessarily buy right away anyway, but those clouds do demand some attention...

I would set a keyframe for the object at frame 1 and another at frame 50. Then I'd go back to frame 1 and change global transparency in the material editor to 100. You should now have an incremental shift from invisible to visible.

Edited to add: I realize now that doesn't work, does it? When you set the transparency to 100 in frame 1, it remains transparent throughout. What I did as a workaround was to make 51 frames, with the object solid at frame 1, invisible at frame 2, then visible at frame 51. Render your animation and clip out frame 1. Someone probably has a better way to do it, but that worked for me.

Wait until you start animating your ecosystems!

A couple of months back I took a Poser figure, applied a BVH running motion, imported the figure into Vue, then linked the camera to his shoulder as if he were holding a large professional camera.

I only did one test this way and wasn't too impressed with the results, but it might have just been the motion file I was using. I haven't had time to try it with a different one.

I tried these suggestions and couldn't get them to work. :(

As a workaround, I just rendered the material to a square image and then applied that image map as the material, but there's gotta be a way to make it work the first time around...

Quote - Nope, for the image I have in mind it must be a sphere!! [LOL]
Awkward ain't I??

Just thinking out loud, here, but couldn't you make the ecosystem's underlying material set to transparent, then plunk that sphere into a larger sphere of water?

Quote - How much is your time worth to you?

I was just about to add that.

Also, I was discussing computers with an acquaintance some weeks ago, and he was detailing his adventures with Dell customer service. He asked me how long I had to wait when I called Apple for service, and I told him I'd never had to call. He asked how long I've owned Apples. When I said twenty years, he grew quiet and thoughtful.

Quote - So given the limitations of  MAC, why do so many people switch to them?

That's part of the problem right there. Many of the limitations are perceived limitations, not actual ones. I see quite a few things posted here on Renderosity that say "PC only" that I know will work fine on my Mac. It's reasonable for you to see those and assume that the creator knew what they were talking about when they said it wouldn't work, but oftentimes they're just saying "PC only" because they don't know and don't have the ability/concern to find out.

In some other cases the limitations are real, but IMO caused by a myopic view toward the market. I bought --or tried to buy-- a digital photo frame as a gift last year, but had to return it because the onboard software couldn't handle images processed by those little-known image-editing programs called Photoshop and iPhoto. In that case, the manufacturer made the mistake of confusing a small percentage of market penetration with small actual numbers, when they should be recognizing that there are still millions of Mac users. It makes some sense, if you're a software designer working in your basement with limited resources, to concentrate on the bigger market, but by my informal calculations (I did some real math, but won't waste your time with it here) that photo frame designer was thumbing its nose at a hundred milliondollars of potential annual sales because they didn't want to spend relatively few man-hours on making it work with a market that, while certainly smaller, has already demonstrated its willingness to spend money on cool gadgets.

Thanks, everyone! I'll try these ideas out. The main problem I've been having with rotating ecosystems is that whenever I edit the ecosystem after the plane's been rotated, the figures snap back to the "original" orientation, so that all the figures end up facing the same direction again. But saving the plane as a .vob is certainly intriguing, and something I should have thought of. And Bruno's link looks useful, if a little over my head at the moment (gives me something to shoot for, eh?)

But in the short term, I decided to try it with a crowd of oblivious bystanders instead of fleeing refugees. Given the subject matter of this particular image, that works just as well --but I still want to solve the original problem, so back to work for me! Thanks again.

Two questions: 1) As xpleet suggests, the size and quality of the render will make a difference; what is your intention for the animation? Is it going online, or on DVD, or Blu-Ray, or all of the above?

1. Is it essential to the quality of your project that it be a single-shot ten-minute animation?

You guys are great! Wabe, as soon as I read your post, I realized that I had had some trouble with transferring my login, so I followed grichter's advice to check it with the utility (I used the installer utility); sure enough, when I reset my admin password, everything started working.

I'm grateful, but a little embarrassed, as I used to provide Mac support in-house at a publisher, and should have been able to figure this out on my own...

If I understand correctly, you can use images as backdrops in Pro Studio. Select your main camera, and in the settings palette on the upper right, you'll see an icon that looks like a screen on a tripod with a star on it. Click that and you'll be able to select your background image. I haven't been able to import an image sequence for animated backgrounds like the dialog seems to suggest I can, but I've often imported single images for still backgrounds.

Of course, I'm having some other severe problems with Vue right now (posting them elsewhere shortly), so my advice should be taken with a grain of salt... ;)