Yes, you convinced me! Although I hate fiddling around with brushes and smudge tools in PS it seems to be the easiest way to get rid of these artifacts! Thank you very much for your suggestions anyway!

No, the meshes are o.K. Rendered in Poser 4 there are no visible holes but more important, if I change the direction of the sunlight from right to left in Vue, I get other artifacts, whereas the bad spots in the image above look o.K. Alternatively I could turn up ambient light and then you can also see that the dark spots are not holes in the mesh but rendering artifacts. If anybody is interested I can upload images to proof this.

Soft shadows and increasing smoothing angles does not help, I already tried this. The meshes in the image above all are smoothed with an angle of 60 (default). Additionally I did not see any difference between smoothing angles of 60 and 90. What does help a little bit is increasing mesh resolution (as with terrains). However just one step of subdivision only will blow up mesh size by a factor of 4 - and will not remove those artefacts to a level they are no longer visisble. More subdivision will cause Vue to crash (the well known and still unresolved memory bug with imported meshes ...) The only thing I found up to now that does the job is changeing the direction of light. If light is coming from the front, there are no artefacts, but no shadows and no contrast too. The result is a boring image, not exactly what I try to achieve.

Fantastic trip you did! You obviously got a lot of valuable memories and hopefully inspiration too!

I'm not a Brycer (hope you don't mind) but I like what people do with Bryce. Object instancing or Eco Systems is really old stuff, you can have it totally free with POV-Ray. With this in mind 600$ for me is really too much for this feature. I have Vue 5 Esprit (the smaller brother) because it is easier to use than POV-Ray. But unfortunately this version has a big memory management issue that E-on apparently can't resolve: even with 2 GB RAM Vue 5 Esprit crashes when you import more than just a few 3rd party objets, e.g. from Poser. And I do like the plants from RDNA and want to use them! I have not yet found a solution that really suits me, therefore I just wait. But C4D seems most promising at the moment.

Just have seen this thread and thought as a POV-Ray and POV-Tree user I could contribute. The link to Gena Obukhov's page,author of POV-Tree is: http://propro.ru/go See workshop/tools for the latest version 1.5. The link in Kathye's message points to the previous version 1.4. If anybody should be interested there is an image with lots of POV-Trees in my gallery (palms are not POV-Trees but all others are): http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=914565&Start=1&Artist=gerberc&ByArtist=Yes I didn't try Arboro yet so I can't say which one is better with respect to plygon count, but that isn't an issue with POV-Ray anyway :-) Regards, Christoph

Just put a 2nd GB of RAM in my PC. Even if it doesn't help too much for Vue 5 at the moment, you can never have enough RAM for raytracing ... My machine is only about half a year old, amazing to see how much dust I found inside. I will start to clean it every 3 months now to prevent overheated CPU!

In my latest post I had only 1 Poser figure but I already had the memory problem before bringing it into the scene. However I had about 10 extra vegetations from RDNA brought into the scene via Poser. So, if the memory issue has something to do with Poser imports, its not limited to figures. What puzzles me is the fact that the problem seems to be solved (or at least much better) if I turn off background drawing, although my ATI Radeon 9600 should work fine with Vue. Did anybody else notice this behaviour?

Thank you! I realized that Vue 5.05 is in beta stage since weeks, seems it doesn't fix the problem yet.

Message edited on: 03/16/2005 14:28

Had the same thing with my 3.6 GHz Intel P4 system with XP Home Edition. Just move all plants to the plant folder and everything is fine. Seems Vue doesn't like subfolders in the plant folder on some systems.

I think this tutorial is a great idea. You may use any of the images in my gallery (see below). Constructive critics is a main driver for improvement! Regards, Christoph http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=gerberc

Yes ... me too, everything is back to normal, thank you :-)

I'm using Win98 and Internet Explorer 5.5 and I have the same problem sice 2 days: everything is working fine but the banner ad's are not displayed anymore and I can't get into the market place ...

Having just seen this thread it makes me feel sad to read what has happened to some of you. There is plenty of embarrasing stuff going on every day, so it's difficult to understand why some people may want to spoil the atmosphere of a place we all like to post and discuss the results of our favourite "obsession" (yes, I'm a Rocky Horror Picture Show fan). Many of the ideas mentioned above on how to tackle the issue seem pretty comprehensible to me (especially visible ranking), altough it's probably very difficult to deny site access to certain individuals. As mentioned previously it's far too easy to hide on the web. Let's hope the best anyway - Christoph

I checked on two machines and it looked fine on both.