I thought my favorite was #20, great lighting and excellent composition. In the end my vote has to go to #23 for originality and by implying a complete story in one still frame. Great job on all!!

Thanks all for the replies. Impish makes a great case as I have been scratching my head for a year now on how to easily animate wind moving plants. I guess I better count my pennies. Michael

Interesting background. I own Poser and hardly ever use it. I ended up here as a desperate newbie switching from Bryce to Vue looking for help with Vue. In this forum I have found a huge number of people willing to share their knowledge, saving me hours/days/weeks of needless head banging. I have also found that to be true in the Carrara, Lightwave, Photoshop and Painter forums. I'm not into the plastic doll thing myself but have found so much support in other areas that it doesn't really matter to me what the other 90% of the site is into. To each his/her own. Thanks for all the help past and future. Michael

This is a beatiful shot!!! I am also curious regarding how you accomplished the cable flex and the floor tile. Was this rendered in C2? Also was how many lights did you use for the set up? Michael

Wow, this has turned out to quite an experiment. All of the ideas posted work and I can see different applications for all of them. The attached screenshots show Kix's vertex fill on the left and Mark's joining on the right. The vertex fill yields a hollow shape and the join yields a solid. To accomplish the join idea I first simplified the curves with a fidelity setting of 100%, this also joined the seperate vertexes. All that remained was to join any vertex forming a hard angle instead of a curve, on this shape that meant a total of 2 joins, easy! Hoofdcommissaris pathfinder idea also works with great ease as long as I don't need 100% accuracy, this is the case often enough to add this to my bag of tricks. Thanks all for the help!! As usual the forum saves the day when I have grown tired of banging my head against the wall. Michael

Kix - The screenshots will hopefully explain what I am getting at. The extrusion shown has the closed option checked in the cross section options but does not close. Mark - It looks as if you are correct. I went into Illustrator and was able to join nodes seemingly joined already on curved segments. I don't know why I did not face this in C1 but am now. I will post an example after I complete the work, it is a huge undertaking. I'm hoping to discover some buried software trick to end my pain. Thanks both of you for the help!! Michael

Thanks Kix and Mark - I will try the joining process in Illustrator and post some images.

Larry - I was having similar problems on a pc and did the following to get a better view of wireframes. Go to file/options and increase your background draw slider to it's max setting. This slowed down my redraw time ever so slightly but made all objects more visible both in shaded and wireframe format. I don't have a lot of mac experience so I can't really guarentee anything but it worked on my pc.

Great info from all and a major insight for me. I have been trying to do a 30 second animation in Vue for the past 6 weeks. All my efforts have ended up in the recycle bin with me wondering what I don't understand about animation in Vue. It is all becoming quite clear now. I believe Vue is a great program but if I could purchase it as a plugin for Lightwave I would do it immediately. Happy rendering!

congrats, great image. i think it would be a great submission for the alien landscape competition. mokba

Wow, you have taken on a big challenge. I would try mapping a procedural to the reflection channel to create some variation in water relection on the leaves themselves. All this in addition to the droplets of course. I agree with Sharen about the placement coordinates, when all else fails math will always save you. Mokba

Wow! What a simple answer. It also leaves all kind of possibilities for transparency and layer mode interaction. Thanks!

I have used both and found the end result of Vue to be far superior. I find the Vue tools more intuitive and easier to understand quickly. That being said the problem I had with Vue was getting used to the setting controls for atmosphere, shader scale, etc. Not actually using the controls but learning to finesse them to get the results I wanted. I think this was generated by my latent experience in Bryce. I have been much happier with the import ability and final output since switching to Vue. Go for it.

Thanks everybody. The faster background redraw worked like a charm. Now I'm on to being able to animate some of my lightwave objects. Thanks again!!

I should have looked at your posting prior to my own. I am suffering from the exact same problem. I have tried everything I can think of to solve this one. It happens not only with my lightwave objects but is also present on any other program I have used and saved out to a 3ds object. It may be time to contact e-on.